Elizabeth Edmondson - Voyage of Innocence

‘Well, no.’

‘Or your maid?’

‘No.’

‘She can do that for you as well. She’s extremely competent, she’ll be a great help to you. That’s settled then.’

And it was, to Lally’s dismay. She still hadn’t told Henry that she was bringing Peter with her, and she hoped that news about the sickly boy didn’t reach her husband through the letters that his officious family wrote to him whenever they had an idle moment. Fortunately, Henry rarely read private letters; she suspected the only ones he looked at with any attention were the ones from her, and she took care to keep them brief.

‘Official correspondence is enough for any man,’ he would say, opening a long screed from his mother, flicking through the pages and crumpling the letter into a ball before tossing it into the waste-paper basket.

This wasn’t Miss Tyrell’s first voyage. She’d crossed the Atlantic more than once, had accompanied the Veres out to Hong Kong – now, there was a strange country – and had spent six months in Bombay. She liked India. She liked the heat and the people and the energy, although the shocking poverty and the skinny animals made her uncomfortable.

She was pleased for the chance to work her passage rather than pay for it herself. For one thing, it meant she would be travelling first class, which was what she was accustomed to. If she’d had to pay, it would have been tourist class, and a shared cabin down in the bowels of the ship, and not at all the kind of company she was used to. She wasn’t sure about this Mrs Messenger, though. Lady Sake had spoken of her in the pitying tone her employers used about half-wits, cripples and social outsiders.

‘Of course Harry is absolutely one of us, the Messengers go back for ever, but Lally, as they call her, I believe her name is actually Lavender, is not. She’s American, well that’s another world, don’t you think? Headstrong, I’d say, by the look of her, but then you’d need strength of character to cope with Harry, I never knew a man with so much energy. Her father’s a politician, from Chicago of all places. He was a doctor before he went into the Senate, Irish, of course, her name was Fitzpatrick. And she’s Catholic. Will that bother you, Nanny?’

Having no religious convictions of her own, merely subscribing to the conventional Anglicanism of her employers, Miss Tyrell said no, in the tone of voice that made Lady Sake feel for a moment that she had committed a solecism by even mentioning religion.

‘I do hope you don’t suffer from seasickness, Miss Tyrell. It can be very bad in the Bay of Biscay at that time of year.’

Seasick? Not her. As the SS Gloriana sailed into what her crew called a dirty night, her stomach was perfectly in order. She gave Peter a dose of tonic, though, just in case there should be any inclination to collywobbles, as she called any kind of stomach upset, and it would help to keep him regular, so important when a child was convalescent. Peter was the nervy sort, you could see that, although that might be due to his having been so ill. And Mrs Messenger? Miss Tyrell felt sorry for her. She didn’t care to see a young woman with those tired eyes and that look of haunted care to her. The child had been in danger, yes, but he was better now, and he was a stepson, not one of her own. Perhaps that was the problem. But here she was, on her way back to India, to be reunited with her husband. This was a time for happiness, not for fretting.

And not a good sailor by the look of her.

‘Run along, Peter, Mummy’s not feeling very well and isn’t in the mood for your chatter.’

‘I was only telling her about some people she knows on board, that’s all.’ It wasn’t for Miss Tyrell to keep him away from his mother. Then he understood. ‘She’s seasick,’ he said with scorn.

Perdita Richardson looked around her narrow cabin. She liked the round porthole, it had a distinctly nautical air that was pleasing; if you were going to be shunted off on a sea voyage, then you might as well feel you were on board a ship, and not merely in some floating hotel. She’d seen her friend Tish and her new husband off last year after their wedding. They’d had a stateroom on the Queen Mary – they’d been going to spend their honeymoon with her husband’s family in New England – and Perdita had been disappointed to see how ordinary it was. Plush, but it could have been a hotel anywhere.

This, however, was unquestionably shipshape; fitted lockers beneath the bunk, everything in its place. She took off the shapeless brown felt hat she’d crammed on her head for want of anything better being immediately to hand, and gave her hair a vigorous ruffle. Curly and unmanageable, she kept it in place when she could be bothered with a fearsome array of pins and fixative. Usually, she left it in its natural state; that was one good thing about being a student of music, appearances went for very little. Most of her fellow students at the Royal Academy of Music were young and hard-up and had minds above mundane items of clothing or the nice arrangement of hair.

She’d tried cutting her thick curls short, but in her opinion it made her look like one of the woolly sheep that chewed the grass around her home in Westmoreland, and there was some hope of elegance, just every now and then, if you had hair long enough to be pinned up. She rummaged in her bag for a hairbrush and tugged it through the disorder. It made little difference to her appearance, but she felt she had made an effort.

Not evening dress the first night out, everyone knew that. So she’d wear – what? Despite the small cabin and the untidy hair, Perdita was far from being a poor student, or a poor anything. Her family were wealthy and she had money of her own; she could buy all the clothes she wanted, but found it difficult to find much ready-made that fitted her tall, rangy frame, and had a dislike of the fussing around at the dressmakers, as she put it. So her clothes were an odd collection of what she’d found that fitted her, including some pairs of men’s slacks, which she found comfortable and which fitted her long legs. No one made anything of them at college, but now, throwing open the lid of her suitcase, she did wonder whether they were quite right for a sea voyage.

I expect lots of people will be frightfully posh, she said to herself. Well, they’ll have to be satisfied with their own poshness, how I look can’t affect them at all. She took out a favourite green dress, gave it a shake, and opened the narrow cupboard to find a coat hanger.

A woman in uniform appeared at the door as though by magic. Small and shrewish, she cast a disapproving look at Perdita’s open suitcase and stepped inside the cabin, making Perdita retreat until she had her back against the washbasin, the green dress held in front of her like a shield.

‘I’ll unpack for you, miss. I’m your stewardess. My name’s Merkin.’

‘Oh, thank you. Only, I can do it myself.’

Merkin paid no attention. ‘You go along to the dining room and put your name down for the second sitting. Not the first, mind, that’s for kiddies and people who don’t care for the social side. My passengers always take the second sitting.’

Such was Merkin’s moral force that Perdita found herself outside her cabin and following the arrows guiding her to G-deck.

‘Boat drill half an hour after we sail, miss,’ Merkin called after her. ‘You’re muster station twenty-three, and you’ll need to have your life-jacket with you.’

Boat drill? Lifejacket? This was Perdita’s first voyage, and she was mystified. Not to worry, someone would explain it to her, and say where she had to be and what she had to do. People always were keen to put you on the right path, especially when it came to anything as institutional-sounding as boat drill. Like fire drill at school, only not shinning down ladders in the dead of night and usually in the rain, it was to be hoped.