Acts of Mutiny (23 page)

Much as she liked Cheryl and the way she could live two lives at once – for she was sure Cheryl … Yes, of course she knew Cheryl was not just saucy insinuation and would have no hesitation in flirting, in entering a liaison even, entering it physically if she wished to … Yes, she was sure enough now that Cheryl
would
take the necessary steps to gratify her inclinations, no matter for society or gossip. No matter for marriage vows and God and all that. Just so long as she could be reasonably certain of getting away with it. Good luck to her, then.

Cheryl would regard it as her right, her
freedom
, darling. Why, it could well be Cheryl was already ‘romantically involved’ this trip. There had been an extra edge to her suggestive comments of late, since the tail end of the Red Sea.

Penny thought so. Now for her, too, the matter of Robert Kettle was suddenly a real choice. Between real yes and real no. And it was horrifying. Her feelings were aroused. Her flesh had known before she did. All the others had seen it coming. Their anxiety had grown as they sensed her body beginning to assert itself. They could have had no idea, of course, how her womb had thrown its helpless little passenger overboard. But while she was drenched and grief-stricken with that, they had caught the meaning intuitively. They had all gone on to a state of alert.

And so had she. Eventually, she dozed with exhaustion. But sleep was fraught and shallow, and only held her fitfully. The preoccupation circled, around and again. It would not stop. Eventually she thrashed the bedclothes from her bunk and sat up. Then she descended her ladder and flung off her nightdress. She stood naked in the dark. She scratched at her skin with the nails she had not filed for several days. Robert. Robert. She was pincered between two moral schemes, the one full of courtly sacrifice, her mother’s, with its iron will, school discipline and the greater good; the other represented by a woman such as Cheryl. The conflict was hateful.

Probing with her hands stretched out in front of her, she established the three or four feet of space between sink and bunk, door and dressing-table, and paced as best she could. How she would have loved tea and daylight and counsel – but none was available. The electric light in her cabin would merely mock her before the mirror. In this dark, in this cramped space she must create some resolution for herself. She must.

Renunciation was her duty. But that simply would not square with what could only be described as the wonderful purity of it all. It was like a call. Yet as far as she could see, the only passage to her feelings for Robert was a sort of grand harlotry. She was being tested, then? Surely Cheryl had been placed in her way as a snare and a delusion. By day Cheryl loved to talk, loved to burst out, almost, with innuendo – her body strained at her clothes. By night, if her chatter were to be believed, she luxuriated. Penny had the odd sense, however, that Cheryl’s men were inconsequential, and she wrapped herself somehow in her own rich and freckled skin – to hide, in a way, behind that. There was something unreal about it. In any of Cheryl’s intrigues or
affaires
, Penny suspected, it was always Lucas she thought of deep down.

Did she feel that of Hugh? As she turned, her foot stubbed against the bunk support. She cursed.

Cheryl ‘loved’ Lucas. Each intoxication would come to an end. Theirs was a tropical species of love, strange, strongly female, casual. It flourished in the heat. But then again, Penny realised, it was perhaps to be found everywhere in England too, if under glass and protected from draughts. She had lived so strait-laced a life at home, so sequestered, that she had misread her own class. For surely this voyage must show her what Cheryl kept saying: that in all probability the Torboys situation was in no way unique – just explicit; and there were already a number of sexual intrigues in progress, out of the starboard glare.

Blinkered fool. In books, where morality mattered, she could see through people so easily. Here, in real life, it did not matter. Because nobody actually minded. If the old dowager voyagers, as Paul Finch-Clark called them, tut-tutted at Cheryl Torboys and gave looks, it was only because they were jealous. And because their rheumy, domed and sun-freckled old men followed Cheryl’s passing with their eyes, as though she were some seagoing Marilyn Monroe. And her own passing, come to that. Probably with their tongues as well. Nobody cared. The truth was disturbing. Most of all, nobody would have dreamed of taking Cheryl under their wing. So why, then, was such especial chaperonage being extended to herself? For it definitely was. They must think there was something very serious about her. If so, what?

Penny sat down in the chair in front of her invisible mirror. She knew the answer well enough. Why not admit it? Let the word into her head. It was desire. On the instant, her brain felt effervescent, transplanted. Her thought raced white-hot. Desire was neither inclination nor instinct, but something much more dangerous. She was beginning to understand that – and its implications. The journey: it had shaken her up, like the genie in a bottle. She was primed to explode. She laughed out loud. A starburst was happening.

She opened her door and immediately shrank back. Subdued lights were on in the corridor. Then she grew bold. Let them see. She was being challenged in her sex. Subjects never spoken of had been raised. For Robert she felt desire, not instinct. There was a difference, and the others knew it, deep down. Nothing more threatening to those self-appointed guardians could occur than that her whole person should make a choice of Robert Kettle. It was her they would be defending themselves against, sharpening up the daggers. Her intelligence had fallen in love – the brand on her imagination of his sunburnt body. It scared them stiff. How they were lining up against her, against the pair of them – even though they had committed no … Why, they had not even kissed.

Robert was going out to do the same work as Hugh. He was in the same trade of weapons and missiles and the like. Her heart sank and went dark, momentarily. There was some conspiracy. Hugh had gone out in September. He had said he was going via the Pacific. A stopover. A few tests. Some sequence of events, letters, news reports and former vague uneasinesses clicked together in her mind. The name of Christmas Island against the crackle and fireworks of happiness.

But she was in love. And if from Robert somehow had come that joy, then it could not be that he was the same as those frightened people. How defiant she felt. So far Robert and she had merely touched hands. She resisted the impulse to stride out. Instead she closed the door.

The boys. What could she do? She could not undermine them. Once more her spirit sank. She gripped the wash-basin before the porthole, then, straightening up, yanked her curtains roughly apart. There was the beginning of dawn. She turned. Even now the items of her cabin were becoming visible. In a moment or two it would be day. With the boys she had a duty as a woman beyond anything laid on a man. She could never leave the boys. She was tied utterly by her love for them. And by that everyone had a hold over her.

Except that having left them … She had left them in fact. It had given her this platform, this space in which to fall … this region of illumination. Having left them to think and gather herself as it were, why, what were they to be called to if not a new life, a new world, a new way of being. She seemed to see the whole position from high up, very detached and clear, a floodlit, now dawn-lit vision of her place in things.

But she was building castles in the air. It was all in her mind. She knew nothing, not even that he felt anything for her in the way she was beginning to feel for him. Not for certain. Not quite. Through her cabin floor she felt the engines start into life. It would not do.

‘In this great ship, my dear little children,’ said Mr Tingay, ‘it would be all too easy for me to occupy you with the easiest things. The great Bible story of Noah, for example, is the story of a ship. That’s something we all learn at Nanny’s knee. Yet there are many folk who have never heard even this charming and instructive tale. In the lovely words of the hymn we have just sung:

                      
‘The Bible they have never read

                      
They know not that the Saviour said

                      
Suffer little children to come unto me.

‘And indeed, in my mission to the original peoples of Australia, I shall, sadly, children, be starting “from scratch”. These are folk who have never seen the sea, who couldn’t imagine what the great flood might be like. Yet the signs of God’s work are there, even in the baking centre of Australia. Would you believe it, there are sea shells in the very floor of the desert. So it must have been some time after our great lesson in the dawning of time that these poor Aboriginal people chose to live in the waterless wastes of an unvisited continent. Yes, these odd, furthest-flung children of Ham actually preferred living in the hottest, harshest place on earth. God has painted them black for it, but they have so far missed out on his message. I shall have a hard job getting them to think about Noah’s Ark, shan’t I?’

There were polite titters as on the previous Sunday. Sitting on my own at the back of the dance space, I tried to catch Finlay’s eye, but she would not look at me.

‘But you, young as you are, are already capable of so much more. You are privileged. You are intelligent. Think of your scripture classes at your prep schools, or wherever it is you went. How lucky you are to have met Jesus in the Bible, in your churches. Met him in person. You are children of the promise. We had that last week. Do you remember?’

Heads nodded, some possibly with boredom.

‘There was another ark, children. Wasn’t there. Oh yes. We know there was another ark. Hands up who knows what the other ark was?’

Several desultory hands went up. Unfortunately, I put up mine too. ‘The
Ark Royal
, sir. It’s an aircraft carrier.’ I had seen it at Chatham with my father.

There was a burst of laughter as the gathering came to life. Finlay turned round and led the scorn, and the faces.

‘Don’t be facetious, that boy. Or I’ll report you,’ said Mr Tingay.

‘The Ark of the Covenant, sir.’ It was one of the anonymous little English girls.

‘Of course it is,’ said Mr Tingay, and went on to detail the sacred container that caused the walls of Jericho to collapse. I listened, humiliated in front of the ship’s company of children.

We all waited for Dragnet. I found myself wondering about the conversation I had overheard between Messrs Chaunteyman and Barnwell, under the clock tower back in Aden.

‘I can assure you, Mr Chaunteyman, nothing is being hidden from you; there are no secrets, there is no conspiracy’

Mr Chaunteyman had started to get angry. He shook Mr Barnwell’s shoulder. ‘Hey, now. What do you guys think you’re playing at. You’ve got no damned authority over my comings and goings, mister. Dave Chaunteyman sails where he pleases.’

‘I can’t abide an officer who won’t hold his liquor, Mr Chaunteyman,’ Mr Barnwell had said coldly. ‘No doubt you’ll soon be finding Reds under all our beds, but they’ll be entirely of your own troubled fantasy, sir. Now please get a grip on yourself, before you embarrass your … good lady here.’ He indicated my mother, and Chaunteyman seemed to subside, abashed. That was the moment when the illusion I had of him first began to crumble. I could not believe what I had heard.

Through a long lens I see myself again in that moment. I have had my week of Dragnet and the Red Sea; now something has changed. Two more items from my suitcase have been dropped into the world. Maybe if I empty any more I shall go critical, targeted to destroy the wrong parents. I am turning myself into a man of war again. The hatred in my body is like a hot iron. I am gradually making room for it – like a heavy-duty soldering iron left switched on against a lead box. The silver melt runs off in a little pool, dripping and hardening on the deck below. How hatred itches to get at the intricacies of things. It works them loose. It finds out the weak points.

The Arabian Sea lay under an intense blue-white dome, its taste was warm, its own colour the blue of jewel stones.

If I was unsure of Finlay, what matter. Rejection I had dealt with before. Dragnet ran its course and I stayed apart, uninvited.

At last there were flying fish. They were revealed by Rosalind Finch-Clark – and her mother. Dilys Finch-Clark I had imagined to be a very private and retiring woman. So far she had proved elusive, seen only in glimpses, usually through the doorways of small interior spaces. Perhaps she liked creating an aura around herself. She was unsuccessful. I never heard anyone express romantic curiosity concerning her at all. Even her husband Paul seemed to show no interest in her.

Now she was made flesh I could see she was completely ordinary – of ordinary size, colouring, features and dress. And she happened to be occupying the place on the foredeck rail nearest the bow – a place I liked to regard as mine. Barnwell’s aircrew had commandeered the other side, and were throwing things into the sea. Rosalind leaned out next to her mother with her feet on the first wire. ‘Look. There’s one.’ She pointed.

Her mother studied the bow wave. I stood up next to Rosalind and followed the line of her finger. A small streak of silver leaped and skidded in the wave’s glitter, keeping pace with the white cut of the ship’s stem. Then another. Then a rush of five or six at once. They were easy to see once you believed in them. All exuberance, they appeared to love racing us. We watched for ten minutes or so. Dilys wondered whether it could be the same twenty or so fish who kept swimming so fast as to escape the surface; or whether they were replaced by new relays.