Salley Vickers - Dancing Backwards

‘It’s ever so exciting, isn’t it?’ Valerie asked. She looked, Vi thought, a little depressed.

Her husband had several complaints. ‘No room to swing a cat in our cabin, never mind the wife! Daylight robbery when you think what we’re paying for this. Have you seen the price of the booze?’

‘Baz doesn’t drink,’ Martha said, ‘so I tend not to much either.’ She turned to Vi. ‘How about you?’

‘I drink like a fish,’ Vi said and was rewarded by another dazzling grin from Baz. ‘Did you never drink?’ she asked.

‘My mother’s religion forbade it but, you know, when I got to college and it seemed that at long last I could defy her I found I didn’t like the taste after all.’

‘Did you tell your mother?’

‘He did and she said “The Lord works in mysterious ways”,’ Martha said.

Captain Ryle was confiding to no one in particular that until he met his wife his mother had been his rock and stay, when another couple, Greg and Heather, who had left their four-year-old, Patrick, asleep in the cabin, joined the table.

‘There’s a baby alarm,’ Greg explained. He was still under the delusion that everyone was as captivated by his child as he was. ‘It goes through to a central minding station and if there’s any crying they come and let you know. At least we hope they do.’ He laughed nervously.

‘He’s usually very good.’ In the absence of any interest from the other diners, Heather took up the baton of parental concern. ‘Only we were worried that the movement of the ship might wake him, you know, in a different environment…’

Vi said that she felt that the rocking of the ship might induce rather than hamper sleep. Patrick’s mother looked grateful. The other diners ignored this exchange, supposing, perhaps correctly, that if a stand was not taken from the start the topic of childrearing could take over.

The table was set for eleven but only eight guests appeared.

‘D’you think they cancelled?’ Valerie Garson asked, over her seared yellow fin tuna.

‘They won’t have got a refund,’ Les assured the rest of table. ‘I looked into it when it looked as if Val’s mother might fall off the branch.’

Captain Ryle was tucking into a lamb chop. Years of being at sea had given him an understandable aversion to fish. ‘They’ll be at one of the other restaurants.’

‘Can you eat just anywhere, then?’ Valerie Garson pursued. Les had been advising their friends in Liss that the Alexandria was the most superior of the several dining possibilities.

The captain explained that if she fancied a change, then there were several other first-rate venues. He also explained, to anyone who cared to listen, what ‘first-rate’ meant while Vi, who knew this already, affected interest.

‘Still, it’s nice to dress up once in a while,’ Valerie Garson said, looking doubtful.

‘She’s packed for Bloody Britain. Different fancy dress for every night. Nearly broke the bank!’ Les announced. He had ordered a bottle of one of the cheaper champagnes.

Martha said, ‘Oh dear, I’ve only brought one long dress. Do you think it matters?’

‘Of course not,’ said Vi, impatient with all this fuss. ‘If I have to dress up each night I shall certainly not bother to dine here.’

After dinner, Les became expansive and invited everyone who cared for a postprandial nip to join him at the bar. The captain asked Vi if he could show her round the ship.

‘There’s a champion little show on at the theatre tonight. Kiss Me Kate . It’s a company from Exeter. Kath had a cousin, a second cousin, to be precise, in Exeter.’

Vi excused herself with a fictitious headache and went out on deck. A lopsided luminous moon had risen and was laying out across the black water long ribbons of fragile fraying silver. Waves slapped arhythmically against the steel flanks of the ship as she powered purposefully on into the heart of the Atlantic. The air, infused with the moon’s chill silver, wrapped itself freshly and sweetly around her face.

She stood, absorbing the subtle shades and distinctive smells of the sea. What a peculiar thing she had done. And for what would very likely turn out to be a wild-goose chase. Crossing over to the kingdom of night, time seemed suddenly to gather with new possibility. Out of the darkness a strange sense of well-being descended on her, a feeling that things might turn out all right after all.

To know the ropes: on a square-rigged ship there were many miles of rigging. It took an experienced seaman to know the ropes.

Before going to bed, Vi pushed open the heavy glass door which divided the cabin from the balcony. It took an effort, she wasn’t strong, and a wind was getting up and the door was designed to spring back against any influx of weather. Finally she managed to wedge it open with one of the metal balcony chairs, so that her night could be spent as close as possible to the sea, being rocked in its strong grip like the baby in the old nursery rhyme.

When she was a child, her mother had told her that long ago there had been a pirate in the family, whose career had ended dramatically when he was hanged for treason on the high seas. Her mother had died when Vi was not quite ten. As with many of the best storytellers, the boundaries of her mother’s reality were, Vi now suspected, blurred. But whether or not it was the legacy of piratical blood in her veins, the sea was comforting to her.

When she woke next morning, the ocean which had beaten all night in her mind had dissolved into the sound of the steady irregular thrashing of water on the ship’s sides. She slid from under the heavy counterpane, which she’d kept over her against the cold, and went barefoot out on to the wooden deck of the balcony.

The sky was not quite fully alight. Splashes of crimson and orange shivered on the shot-satin water. A solitary white bird made a graceful arc above her head against the olive and rose-dragged sky. She stood in her nightdress, flexing her bare toes on the cold wood, the breeze wrapping the thin cotton close round her body, looking out to the faint line where the deceiving eye suggests that sea meets sky. Before her the ocean stretched, calmly offering nothing but its own vast, limitless, unapolo-getic being.

A kind of frenzy had set in when Vi, washed and dressed, went down to breakfast a little later. Cereals of all kinds, were available: Corn Flakes, Branflakes, Rice Krispies, Shredded Wheat, Weetabix, Cocopops, Fru-grains, muesli, together with stewed prunes, pears, apricots, green figs, sliced cheeses, ham, salami, smoked salmon, as well as bacon, sausage, black pudding, kippers, haddock, eggs cooked to order, mushrooms, tomatoes, pancakes, porridge, waffles and every conceivable variety of bread, muffins and toast. Besides these were jams, honey, marmalade, Marmite and peanut butter (with a prominent health and safety warning about possible allergies). Lest this were not enough, there were plates of fresh pineapple, cantaloupe, watermelon, grapefruit and piles of apples, pears, oranges, grapes, strawberries, blueberries, mango, kiwi fruit, guava, passion fruit and bunches of bananas.

Although the food was continually being replenished by teams of attentive waiting staff (and no passenger was left from 5 a.m., ‘Dawn snack’, till midnight, ‘Bedtime cookies and cocoa’, for more than fifteen minutes without ready supplies) a fever of impatience had overtaken the line of passengers as Vi queued for a bowl of muesli.

Even more consternation was being stirred up over the question of the tables. Those with sea views were sought after hotly. A bagging system was in operation: books and cardigans had been left to establish possession. This strategy, however, was not proof against the more experienced voyagers, who were willing to brazen it out and remove these colonising tokens in order to stake out their own claims. Those who had been on past cruises, and knew the score, took the precaution of leaving one party on guard while others foraged for food.