Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

Rosie quickly found that she was not a natural sailor, and that she felt nauseous if she did much walking about. Whenever possible, she sat or lay down, especially whilst passing through the Bay of Biscay. The result of this was that Daniel began for the first time to get to know his daughter properly.

Since Esther’s birth, he had been, as it seemed to him, the victim of a determined and coordinated female conspiracy to keep him out of the picture. If Esther cried, and he picked her up, she was immediately dragged from his arms by a woman who knew how to comfort a child properly. It might be Rosie, or Ottilie, or Mrs McCosh, or even a visitor. If he wanted to shovel food into her mouth, the spoon was wrested from him.

He had found this very irritating, but the fact was that this is how everything was done, and this was how women saw the world. Bits of it belonged to them, and bits of it to the men, and that was that.

Working in Birmingham at Henley’s had not made it any easier to forge a bond with Esther, and neither had the hiring of Mary FitzGerald St George, something which, although she was a lovely woman, Daniel had found inexplicable and pointless in a household where there were at least three women with very little to do, and where there were two other women who were somewhat busier but adored the child just as much. He had all but missed the periods when Esther had been a babe-in-arms, and when she had been crawling about at random, pulling books off shelves and chewing the tassels off the rugs.

Mrs McCosh had flatly declined to allow Mary FitzGerald St George to go with her charge to Ceylon, because ‘she is quite indispensible to me’, and so it was that Daniel and Rosie had hired a ‘travelling nurse’ to accompany them as far as Ceylon, where they would hire a resident one. Daniel reflected again that it was just as well that Mary was not coming. There was something dispiriting about having to face temptation, and an inevitable sense of impending catastrophe if one gave way to it.

The travelling nurse, it transpired, had travelled a great deal in trains, even going to Constantinople on the Orient Express , but had never gone very far by sea. The ship was a small one, about twenty-five years old, with three exiguous masts and one funnel, set back at a jaunty angle. It sat low in the water, and earned its keep on the run to India and back, through Suez. Thanks to its constant rolling and yawing, the travelling nurse was prostrate with sickness almost from the moment of departure, and Rosie and Daniel saw very little of her during the whole voyage, even forgetting her name within a few months of arrival. She was the kind of person whose photograph would turn up in a family album, and nobody would be able to remember who she was or why she was there.

Rosie’s lack of sea legs meant that Daniel had to look after Esther whether he wanted to or not, and he found that for the most part it came very naturally, especially as she was such a sweet-natured child. She was by now two years old, frolicsome and skipping, and very pretty, her hair still in golden yellow curls, and her eyes as periwinkle blue as her mother’s. Fortunately she was extremely fond of Robinson’s Patent Groats, which Mme Pitt had donated in enormous quantities, and loved boiled eggs with soldiers, so he had no trouble persuading her to eat. She was very attached to her father, and would gaze at him adoringly with one thumb in her mouth, and French Bear clamped under her arm.

The SS Derbyshire was a fantastically hazardous place for a child, with its steel staircases and gangways, and sudden lurches, and so he found himself spending almost all of Esther’s waking hours either holding her hand, carrying her, or with her on his knee as he struggled to read one of his books about Ceylon. Esther liked to fall asleep on her father, thumb in mouth despite Rosie’s fear that she would end up with crooked teeth, and he found himself pinned down for much longer periods than he would have liked. Many hours were devoted to looking for French Bear, which she abandoned in all sorts of strange places, only to panic about it later.

During that time he came to love the sweet scent of her hair and the milky scent of her flesh, the patch of heat she created against his chest and stomach. He liked to point things out to her — ship! — seagull! — aeroplane! — and she would say the words after him. He taught her nonsense rhymes:

Yesterday upon the stair I saw a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today. Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

He taught her some Royal Flying Corps songs, since he had never had any time for nursery rhymes, and neither did he know any. In her quavering, tuneless little voice, she sang:

‘Take the pistons out of my kidley,

And the gugjon pins out of my brain,

From the smallamabak take the clankshaft,

An assemmel the engines gain.’

Daniel crooned:

‘Mademoiselle from Armentières, parlez-vous?

Mademoiselle from Armentières, parlez-vous?

Mademoiselle from Armentières, hasn’t been kissed for many a year,

With an inky-pinky parlez-vous.’

He taught her ‘Frère Jacques’, of course, and ‘Chevaliers de la Table Ronde’, and ‘Sous le Pont d’Avignon’.

They made paper aeroplanes and launched them off the stern, and played a clapping game that Daniel remembered his father teaching him when he was about Esther’s age, which went:

A sailor went to sea sea sea

To see what he could see see see,

But all that he did see see see

Was the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea.

They did it faster and faster until their hands were a blur, and finally Esther was laughing too much and the game collapsed, whereupon Esther would throw herself into his arms, giggling with delight. Then she would cry, ‘Again! Again!’ and off they would go, very slowly at first. Then Esther taught it to Ali Bey, a solemn and dignified Egyptian gentleman whom Daniel had befriended on board. She made him learn to do ‘This is the way the gentleman rides’ and he assisted in the games of ‘One two three whee’ upon which Esther insisted as they promenaded about the decks. They tossed the little girl to each other and pretended that they were going to throw her over the side, which of course she did not believe for a second. Ali Bey was not only very taken with Esther, but was interested in the politics and culture of France. He presented Daniel with a fez, and they sat together on deck after Esther and Rosie were in bed, talking nostalgically about the Loire Valley, the novels of Zola or the effects of the Franco — Prussian war.

Daniel was at first wary of the intimacies of caring for an infant. He felt dubious and nervous about having to wash her at bedtime, and clean her up after going to the lavatory, as if he were worried that she might share in the abashment of a mature woman, or as if he might accidentally damage what his mother always referred to as ‘ sa belle chose ’. It was as good a euphemism as any, so he began to use it himself. Esther was quite frank and unembarrassed, however, and would simply announce, ‘My bottom’s ready, Daddy,’ when she needed cleaning up. When the travelling nurse was indisposed, which was most of the time, he fretted about how to dress her properly. He watched the nurse or Rosie doing it, and quickly realised that it could not have been simpler. Esther had distinct preferences that changed every day, and she would rummage through her own small suitcase throwing unwanted garments onto the floor of the cabin. She had exceedingly fine hair, and Daniel found it difficult to brush it or comb it without causing shrieks of protest.

When Esther was asleep Daniel and Rosie played vingt-et-un , which Rosie won, or chess, which was always won by Daniel. Rosie taught him how to play draughts, and racing demon, a furious game which inevitably ended up in the destruction of the cards. For the first time in their acquaintance they had long hours to fill with reminiscence and conversation, and began to know each other ever better. Rosie had mostly avoided being alone with him for any length of time, but now she beqan to perceive that he was not only handsome, a fact obvious to all, but also amusing and interesting. In this sense, the long journey had the reverse effect to that had on most couples by such voyages. The other passengers were becoming more and more wild with the racheting up of the temperature, and relationships and infidel-ities were being created and destroyed on a daily basis. Daniel found it entertaining, but Rosie was shocked.