Moonshine. Victoria Clayton
Channel. The wind flung the contents of my stomach after them. I bitterly regretted the Battenberg cake.
‘You don’t look well, dear,’ the motherly stewardess had said. ‘Take my advice and have a little something to settle your insides. The crossing’s going to be rough.’
Discouraging though this sounded, they were the first kind words that had been addressed to me all day. She had put down the plate before me and urged me to eat. It would have been impolite to refuse. Now my imagination was haunted by those lurid pink and yellow squares of cake, clad in wrinkled marzipan. As I pressed the cold iron of the ship’s rail against my burning face a sense of monstrous ill-usage overwhelmed me and I groaned aloud.
‘You poor thing! I’ve suffered from mal de mer myself and it’s no fun. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where thy victory?’
The voice was male, self-assured, amused. I suppose there is something comical about sea-sickness if you don’t happen to be feeling it. I wanted neither the sympathy nor the teasing but nausea and faintness made flight impossible. I would have fallen if the stranger had not taken my arm.
‘Steady! Come on, let’s sit down.’
He half carried me to a row of benches. Naturally, at this hour of howling purgatorial darkness, they were empty.
‘I feel awful!’ I moaned. I would have added, ‘The human race is despicable and life is a hideous pantomime,’ if I had not, even in this moment of crisis, a disinclination to make myself utterly ridiculous.
‘It’s bad, I know. You just want to die.’ He pushed me on to a seat and sat down beside me.
‘I do!’ I sobbed, the kindness in his voice encouraging me to give way to melodrama. ‘You’d better let me throw myself in. It’ll be the solution to every problem.’
‘Not for me, it won’t. People might think I pushed you overboard.’
‘How like a man! It’s got nothing to do with you. They’ll think, quite rightly, that I couldn’t stand another minute of this beastly boat going up and down, up and down. Oh, how I hate the sea!’
The man laughed. ‘We haven’t left the bay yet. Mumbles Head is over there, to the right. There’s only a slight breeze and the water’s as smooth as the proverbial mill-pond.’
I lifted my head. The lights of Swansea rose and fell most unpleasantly but the moon sent an unbroken path of beams across the water to meet them. The howling was all in my mind.
‘I hate mill-ponds.’ I continued to cry.
‘That’s right. Let it all out.’ My self-appointed nurse patted my arm from time to time. ‘Now.’ He handed me his handkerchief. ‘Have a good blow. Feeling better?’
I blew. ‘I feel worse if anything.’
‘The trick is not to register the motion of the ship. Don’t, whatever you do, look at the rail. Keep your eyes fastened on something on board. A lifebelt, a noticeboard or a ventilation funnel. Or, even better, look at me.’
The light from the saloon window fell on the right side of his face. I saw someone reassuringly ordinary, fairish, with prominent ears. I could just make out a cheek creased in a smile.
‘I suppose you’re a journalist.’ I was too tired to put as much venom into the accusation as I would have liked.
‘My goodness, you know how to hit where it hurts! Do I look like a sot and a liar? Have I the appeal of a tramp with rotting gums and a leaky urinary tract?’
‘You are, aren’t you?’ I persisted.
‘I’m a literary agent. A pretty innocent game, on the whole. Are you a film star who wants to be alone?’
‘Well … no and yes.’
I stared at him, trying to pierce the darkness and the bone, cortex and synapses that housed the impulses operational in lying. The last ten days had destroyed my trust in anyone I had not known from the baptismal font.
‘What can I say to convince you?’ He felt inside his coat. ‘Wait a minute.’ He stood up and searched his trouser pockets. ‘Here we are. Car keys and useful torch attached. Present from a desperate godmother. At the time I thought it was a bit mean but now I’m grateful.’
He directed a pencil beam on to an open passport. I saw the photograph of a young man with a high forehead and bat-wing ears. Below this it said, Literary Agent.
‘See?’ He directed the light on to the white slot on the passport cover. The name was Christopher Random. ‘That’s me. I can show you my driving licence, if you’d like.’
‘I believe you. I’m sorry I doubted. You’ve been extremely kind, Mr Random.’
‘You can call me Kit.’
‘I’m sure you’ve got more interesting things to do than sitting here with me.’
‘I was about to have some supper. You ought to eat something.’
I shuddered at the idea of the cafeteria with its stuffy smell, smeary tables and bottles sticky with congealed ketchup. ‘I can’t go inside.’
‘All right.’ He stood up. ‘Promise you won’t do anything silly?’
‘Like what?’
He paused. ‘Like look at the waves.’
I closed my eyes. ‘I promise.’
The crying had made me feel better, as it always does. I felt light-headed now, and immensely weary. For the past week and a half I had slept shallowly for no more than a couple of hours at a time before a sense of something being terribly wrong had dragged me back to consciousness. Now I sat in a state of apathy feeling the vibration of the engine through the slats of the bench, the slow chilling of my feet and fingers and the tip of my nose. The realization that I need do nothing for several hours as every second the boat took me further from home seemed like an extraordinary kindness for which I was inexpressibly grateful.
My thoughts wandered and revised my impressions of the day. There had been a long train journey. I had been gripped by an obsessive fear that I was being followed. The man sitting opposite me seemed to be watching me covertly from behind the open pages of his Gardener’s Weekly. I became convinced that he was a newspaper reporter. After we passed Cheltenham he struck up a conversation with the woman next to him. He was a retired miner with silicosis. I saw again his eyes, mild, uncomplaining, his long upper lip and his patchily shaven chin as he talked about his passion for gladioli. And then, as I dozed, it grew redder and more angular, with fierce eyes and bared teeth. It became my father’s face.
I roused myself and pulled my jacket closer round me, for though it was July the breeze from the sea was freezing. A young couple sauntered past, arm-in-arm, gave me a curious glance and walked on. I fell again into a waking dream in which my father’s face was constantly before me. His expression of ferocity as he threw down the newspaper at breakfast ten days before had lodged itself so securely in my memory that whenever I ceased to think actively it floated up from my subconscious to fill the vacuum.
We had been sitting in the dining room, a shrine to Victorian mahogany, brown leather and second-rate watercolours. There were always twelve chairs round the table and we had occupied the same places from the time my brother and I had left the nursery. As in a dentist’s waiting room, we sat as far apart from one another as the arrangement allowed.
My father was a small man and, with characteristic perversity, had chosen to marry my mother, who at five feet eleven was seven inches taller than he. This had embarrassed me horribly as a child. It seemed to detract from the dignity of each and I was afraid that people might laugh at them. If my father was in a good humour with my mother, he called her ‘Lanky’. Her name was actually Laetitia.
When I examined the photograph on my mother’s dressing-table of my father in uniform as a young subaltern I could see he might once have been attractive.