Authors: Margaret Drabble
Seated in the Crystal Bar on the upper deck, and nibbling at shiny brown and white and pink nuggets, Bessie surprised Chrissie by ordering a champagne cocktail. Chrissie had been expecting to steer her attention towards the quaintly christened selection of alcohol-free or low-alcohol cocktails—perhaps a Lucky Driver, or a Shirley Temple, or a Virgin Mary? But Bessie went straight for the best. Chrissie, who had already fortified herself in her cabin with a few fingers of whisky, decided to join her, and you could not imagine a more agreeable sight than the two of them sipping their sparkling beverages from dainty sparkling glasses as they sailed along the coast of Cornwall and out towards the open ocean.
Dinner also was a success. Bessie basked in the deference paid towards herself and her daughter, for although she was a republican, she was also a naïve and irredeemable snob, and her daughter’s unearned title by her second marriage gave her as much pleasure as her daughter’s first marriage to a disrespectful layabout had given her pain. She nodded graciously as the smartly dressed maître d’hôtel led them to their table and at the elegant little Irish waitress who smoothed their napkins for them and offered them varieties of bread and water. She smiled at the suave and conspiratorial wine waiter, adorned with silver chains and spoons and badges of office, and at the supernumerary young Dutchman who seemed to be called upon to fill any unlikely gaps in the flow of attentive service. Bessie settled herself down, and inspected the handsome menu with undisguised anticipation, and wondered, aloud, if she should select the caviar.
Chrissie, whose chair commanded a good view of the dining room, gazed around her with interest and began to relax. Perhaps it was all going to be all right. Even the placing of their table seemed to be in their favour. To Chrissie’s left sat a chilly threesome, consisting of a formidably handsome couple in their late thirties, and the squat and elderly mother of one or the other of them: this trio spoke in German, when it spoke at all, and was not likely to attempt to set up any potentially embarrassing relationship. To her right sat an American couple of unassuming and vaguely scholarly aspect, in late middle age, who nodded and smiled in a friendly but noninvasive manner. There was nobody here to cause alarm or to distress. All was orderly, all in its place. Bessie could relax, and so could her anxious and protective daughter. Chrissie, who had once so loved disorder, had come to appreciate the virtues of calm. The accents of Breaseborough would mingle sweetly and unobtrusively here, in this placeless place, in this floating island of the people and the voices of the world.
Over their dinner, Bessie and Chrissie conversed harmlessly about Henry James. Bessie was rereading
The Bostonians,
which she had chosen as a good book to accompany her from the Old World to the New. She was enjoying it, but was not sure if she approved of its sexual politics. (She did not use that phrase, but would have done had she been Faro’s age, and that is what she meant.) Chrissie was reading, for the first time,
Manhattan Transfer
by Dos Passos. Mother and daughter spoke of the social penetration of Henry James, and of his ambivalent attitude towards women in the professions—the portrait of the young woman doctor was very good, said Bessie. Bessie said that she had attended a supervision at Downing College in Cambridge in which Dr Leavis had spoken of
The Portrait of a Lady,
and had invited Bessie to give an opinion on the significance of James’s use of proper names. Bessie had not read this novel for years. Chrissie said she had never read it, and wasn’t it about marrying for money? If you’ve never read it, you have a treat in store, said Bessie, as she polished off her elaborately constructed little tower of strips of tender green and orange vegetables surmounted by thin warm white slices of delicate breast of fowl.
Were they not a credit to their education, this mother and this daughter, as they sailed across the Atlantic speaking of Henry James?
This good behaviour could not last. But the next day, luckily, Bessie managed to find a harmless outlet for her temperamental need for indignation. She was filled with mild and self-gratifying contempt by the inefficiency of some minor aspects of the lifeboat drill. A confusing message was sent out over the Tannoy, which had to be countermanded and then clarified, and when she and Chrissie reached their designated station on the boat deck, the loudspeaker serving their cluster of life-jacketed and self-consciously giggling passengers did not work at all, and instructions had to be yelled out by the unenhanced human voice, and relayed from group to group amidst the gaming tables and the fruit machines. The fruit machines themselves also attracted a certain censoriousness: how could people waste their time on such pointless activity when so many finer delights were on offer? Bessie had never seen so many gambling devices, nor such a variety of them, in her life. Surely the
QE2
had not always pandered to such low instincts? She had expected something more refined. And she gathered that bingo was played, in the afternoons, in one of the inferior lounges.
Oh dear, here we go,
thought Chrissie. It wasn’t going to be plain sailing after all. Things weren’t going to be good enough.
Chrissie had already wondered if she might be able to sneak off one evening and have a flutter at the roulette table. Nick Gaulden, at this point in the chronology shacked up with an unknown woman called Jenny Pargiter, had once been a gambler, and she’d learned the spin of the wheel with him, back in the spinning sixties. Her mother wouldn’t approve. Maybe she’d be able to sneak out at night when she was asleep?
But Bessie soon forgot her mood of passing irritation with the declining standards of luxury liners. Shortly after the lifeboat exercise, she discovered the library, with which she pronounced herself well pleased. When she had finished her Henry James, there would be plenty here to feed her reading habit. She made friends with the librarian on duty, and settled into a chair with a pile of new hardback novels. Chrissie took a turn by herself on the sun deck. It was safe to leave her mother in an environment of books, and the librarian must be well accustomed to passengers like Bessie Barron. She would probably be pleased to have such an eager consumer on board. Bessie would certainly boost turnover and productivity. Chrissie, pacing briskly along in the comfortable pink-and-white trainers that her mother deplored, remembered all those library books she had carried back and forth for housebound Bessie in Farnleigh. There had been a trauma about a book which Chrissie herself had dropped while reading surreptitiously in the bath. The red binding had run into the pages and stained them. Chrissie had been feeling guilty about this book for thirty years. She had never owned up to the misdemeanour. For some reason she associated it with the death of her grandmother. Was it associative guilt? Was she guilty of the death of her grandmother? She hadn’t liked her all that much, but she hadn’t wished her dead, had she? They must buy a postcard to send to Auntie Dora, said Chrissie to herself, as she clocked up her second mile.
The horizon stretched in all directions, empty, glittering, blue. She passed joggers and strollers and idlers, all enjoying the sea air. How could one, why should one be sad or guilty, in such a space? Her spirits sang. Seagulls swooped and screeched. She saw a sparrow sitting boldly in the rigging. Was it an English sparrow? Had it embarked at Southampton, and would it go all the way with them to New York? Its little wings would never carry it home now. It was a freeloader, a migrant, a stateless mid-Atlantic sparrow.
And so the first day passed, in mild and passive pleasure. Chrissie was relieved when her mother declined the opportunity of listening to an afternoon lecture by a retired politician who had latterly made a living by making inflammatory and apocalyptic utterances on television and in the tabloids. Bessie chose instead to sit in a deck chair with her feet up, wrapped in a blanket, snoozing over Henry James. Chrissie had no criticism of that: she snoozed herself for half an hour before leaping up restlessly to pad once more up and down the deck. All this was just fine. She could escape from her mother, yet be back to base in a matter of minutes. It was a hundred times better than sitting cooped up by the fire in Queen’s Norton, or yawning to death by the television in Surrey. Why hadn’t she been brave enough or generous enough to do this before? Vague fantasies of future cruises arose in Chrissie’s imagination: if it really was as easy as this, maybe Don could accept one of those invitations to lecture his way round the isles of Greece, and Mother could go along with them for free as part of the package? Or she could offer herself as a travelling computer consultant in the Computer Learning Centre? She could do just as good a job as the professional on board the
QE2.
And in this way the recurrent Holiday Problem would be solved, and Mother would have something to look forward to all the year round, for as long as she lived. Chrissie thought she saw a clear blue sky opening in the future, as clear as the sky above her.
There was plenty to do on board. Chrissie read her Dos Passos, and wandered around the boutiques deciding not to buy anything, and wondering whether to have a facial in the Steiner Beauty and Fitness Salon. She watched a game of deck quoits, and inspected an appalling photograph of herself and Bessie, taken at the moment of embarkation. Both of them looked quite mad, grinning falsely, eyes red and manic in the flash, a parody of fun. At least she could trust Bessie not to want one of those. Bessie thought commercial photographs were vulgar.
Chrissie watched her fellow passengers, and eavesdropped with interest. Many were elderly, but there were some young families, and one or two honeymoon couples, and one or two who needed to cross the Atlantic and were too neurotic to fly. There were schoolmistresses on a spree and sixty-year-old wives on wedding anniversary or birthday outings and bridge-playing widows and solitary gentlemen. For some this was a trip of a lifetime, but others, she learned, spent much of their lives afloat. They did the Caribbean, the Pacific, the South China Seas. They even did Alaska and the Arctic. Chrissie was amazed by the manifestation of global restlessness. Why were so many people on the run? And where did all the money come from? From shrewd investments, from retirement income and personal pension plans, from golden handshakes and property sales? Did people sell their homes and take to the high seas, like perpetual pilgrims, forever adrift? Did they know what they were seeking, and would they ever find it? Were they happy on the ocean, or did they carry with them their own deep discontent?
The German-speaking trio at the next table seemed discontented. Their demeanour was strange and unnatural. Over dinner on the second night, Chrissie discreetly studied them. Mother, short, iron-grey-haired, unsmiling, dressed in a low-cut solidly manufactured stiff brocade, and adorned with what looked like a string of antique emeralds, ate her way silently through the lavish menu, and drank her way through several glasses of carefully selected wine. Daughter was slim and golden brown, and her skin had the unreal Technicolor gloss of a model or a film star. She wore a white dress and a good deal of what Chrissie hoped was yellow metal costume jewellery. This blond beauty, with her unnaturally flawless complexion and carefully styled hair and elegant figure, also ate her way through the menu, and paid fastidious attention to her choices. So she too one day might be a fat old woman. It seemed unlikely, but it might be so.
The son-in-law looked like a Viking pirate. His dinner jacket confined a broad and straining chest and giant shoulders. His hair was reddish gold, and he had a short gold beard. Despite his girth, he ate less than his womenfolk. Chrissie could not help watching him. She guessed that he was Scandinavian, and he could have stood in for Sigmundur of the Faeroe Islands, after whose thousand-year-old bones Chrissie had once scrabbled in the driving rain. Was he paying for all these langoustines and cheeses and ices, or was it Mother? They were a silent trio. No small talk was exchanged over the dainties. They spoke more to the obsequious, neat-bummed, olive-skinned, plum-waistcoated wine waiter than they spoke to one another. Chrissie, watching them from the corner of her eye, felt indulgent towards her own blue-gowned, chattering mother, who was so visibly enjoying herself and her lamb cutlets and the spectacle of the other diners and the opportunity to wear a long dress. Bessie was chattering about all the things that she wanted to see in New York. Should she go to the lecture on architecture in the Grand Lounge the following morning? She had heard there were good guided tours of the city. She didn’t want to miss anything.
Chrissie was already worried about what to do with her mother when they arrived. How would she manage to entertain her for four days without exhausting both of them in the effort? Chrissie was a good walker, but she wasn’t as young as she had been, and Bessie did not walk. She had not walked in years. The
QE2,
with its fourteen lifts and its many decks and corridors, was the perfect answer to Bessie’s mobility problem. New York would be a challenge.
The
QE2
could cross the Atlantic much quicker than it does. She has deliberately decided to add an extra day and an extra night to her voyage time. Many prefer to travel peacefully rather than to arrive. Many dread their destinations. Cunard has been advised of this, and has slowed her down accordingly.
Bessie’s days at sea succeeded one another in agreeable languor. She finished
The Bostonians
and made her way rapidly through a Ruth Rendell and a R D. James before sinking back into the past with Anthony Trollope. She did not much like the look of
Manhattan Transfer,
and said she would save it up to read on arrival. She made the acquaintance of a retired headmistress, with whom she discussed the comprehensive system, of which neither approved, and the West Riding Education Authority, of which Bessie loyally spoke highly. They also spoke, with restrained competition, of gardening. Bessie established that her garden was the larger, and was content. Bessie also exchanged friendly words with people in passing, and as far as Chrissie could see she did not manage to bore, annoy or embarrass anyone. And she went out of her way to mention from time to time that she was grateful to Chrissie for arranging this treat.