Acts of Mutiny (28 page)

She went on. ‘Just like that. After all, we hardly know each other. I should get you a drink. Will you take coffee? Or tea? Oh, but then the steward … I could go out and get you something?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s all right.’

She smiled and perched on the edge of the lower bunk. He noticed what she was wearing at last: a very dark purple frock, wired and fitted above a full skirt. She had put a loose white cardigan over it. Its folded edge brushed at the artificial posy stitched to a corner of her neckline. There was a string of deep green stones against the skin of her breast.

‘To tell you the truth, I feel out of my depth. I haven’t even called you by your name.’

‘Call me Penny. Do please call me Penny’ She kicked off her high evening shoes and pulled her feet up on to the mattress; side on to him, hugging her knees, she laid her head down on them so as to fit neatly in the bunk space. The skirt hung behind her arm and over the bedside like a drape.

‘Penny,’ he said in a whisper. He felt his heart turn over. ‘But you know I’ve never been married … or anything.’

‘I’m sure I’ve been married enough for at least two of us.’

‘But … I’m younger than you.’

‘So what if you are. Do you think it matters to me precisely how many times we have gone around the sun since you were born? Oh, but you’re an astronomer. It will matter terribly to you. I’d forgotten.’

‘It doesn’t matter in the slightest to me.’

‘You promise?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then we’ll say no more about that! Robert Kettle! Well.’ She stood up and came the one step towards him, to the centre of the cabin. ‘And how is your sunburn?’

He started. ‘The boy, Pom, or whatever his name is. He spoke to me. Just as I was plucking up courage to come down and knock at your door.’

‘Ha! And what did the ubiquitous Pom want, to be keeping you from your destiny?’ She fixed his eye again with hers.

Robert felt it was a test, wrapped up in joking, in dramatics – of his commitment. ‘He knew I was coming to see you.’

‘Did he? Wretched Lite monkey’

‘He wanted me to tell you about something. Some nonsense. I’ve forgotten already. No: he said there was something in the hold. I said I’d inform the authorities. That appeared to satisfy him. He went off along the deck. He gives me the shivers, to be honest.’

‘Oh, Pom’s all right. He noticed you were burning.’ Penny dropped her gaze, picked up a hairbrush from the dressing-table and, bending her knees, touched at her hair very briefly in the mirror.

‘Is it obvious?’

She turned back, laughing. ‘In the sun that day. He was the one who realised.’

‘I should be grateful then. But …’

‘Perhaps he’s looking after us.’

‘He was worried about the ship. He’s strange. Penny, I …’ There was something he wished he could say, though he did not know what it was, and the words would not form. Instead some sour tone came out: ‘Wretched kid should have been in bed. Little toad.’

‘Don’t.’

‘What?’

‘Sorry. It’s nothing. Foolish of me. The mention of a toad. It brought something back. But I’ll tell you another time. It’s all right. It’s all right, honestly. Darling.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s nothing. It’s nothing, Robert.’ She leaned forward and placed her hand on his shoulder. ‘Your skin. I couldn’t forget it.’

And he caught her hand, passionately, yet his voice still came out wrongly – prosaic. ‘It’s been peeling. I’m a mess. Though it’s stopped hurting. Almost.’

‘It will be all right. You’ll see. And you understand, don’t you, Robert Kettle, that from now on I shall be the judge of whether you’re a mess? You do realise this, don’t you?’

Robert nodded. He felt his face cover over with a wide, unstoppable and childlike smile.

‘Then we must say no more at all, I mink, until you’ve held me in your arms. There aren’t prying eyes in here.’

He stood to embrace her for the second time in his life. Her back, her sides in the dark purple dress, felt softer than they had under the stars on the boat deck, as if, on stockinged feet in the privacy she had thrown about them at last, she could let her body speak plainly. From the pressure of her mouth on his, he read what he wanted.

‘There. The Southern Cross. Crux, we call it.’ From the black horizon the cross had risen. It lay slightly on its side, wearing its bright interior star like a beauty spot.

‘How lovely,’ she said. ‘How unimaginably lovely it is.’

They had come back to the boat deck. It was long past midnight. Not a soul was astir; there was no sound more than the murmur of the engines and of the sea against the side. Off to the right, beyond the equally deserted steerage, the wake stretched behind them in a double line of muted white; mixing, and then tapering off into an exquisitely extended dark curve that ended at the sky. Everything was quite clear and absolutely visible. There was light of a different kind; light, you would say, with the lightest of touches.

‘It is so new.’ Penny gazed upwards. ‘They’ve become, well, intimate, the stars. But these, the ones I could never have seen back in England. So familiar.’ She turned to him. ‘And still so new.’

He smiled. ‘How must sailors have felt when they first came here? On the brim of the southern seas. Where are your bearings if the stars change? Everything is different.’

‘Everything is quite different.’ She smoothed her fingers over the side of his neck, tracing the turn of the chin down and then back, where he shaved. A minute regrowth of bristles was detectable even from four hours ago. ‘I’m just learning you. Can you imagine that?’ She pressed upwards to kiss the place, grazing her lips on him, back and forth.

And in return he pressed her tightly against him, and, boldly, opened the zip of her dress to feel the route down her spine where her body narrowed and then filled out again to her hips.

‘Do all lovers feel like this?’ she whispered.

‘Of course they don’t,’ he said. ‘There are no lovers but us.’

The confident words surprised him. Perhaps they came a touch too sharply.

But she did not mind. ‘Oh yes. Of course. None in the world. I was quite forgetting. I still had the foolish impression, darling, that under the decks there were a thousand real people all asleep. But they’re not real at all, are they. I was forgetting.’

They explored again the little wave motion they had discovered, where their bodies fitted all along. The arousal bathed them in a sudden heat that sprang up like the flavours in the breeze.

‘And can you seriously believe Stella Madeley is real?’ Robert said, gently now, after a moment.

‘I thought she would cling on to the bitter end. I thought they were never going to let us be. As if the world depended on it.’

‘As if it’s their business. Nobody real would mind. Surely.’

She laughed. That was it, absolutely. Nobody real would mind. She pictured Stella Madeley – a perpetual head prefect, her grey hair still trapped in some undefinable school ‘shape’. No, neither she nor her fussy, diffident Group Captain of a husband could ever be real. This was real.

She looked up again. A meteor shower speared out of the zenith.

‘I love your neck,’ Robert said. ‘Your shoulders.’

‘You may have them, then.’

They laughed again together, at their childlike lovers’ discourse, laughing in the same murmur as their speech.

‘I shall. I want nothing more – except the rest of you.’ Again the roughness of tone. It was as though his body spoke for him, while his head hardly coped.

‘You shall. For Stella Madeley and all those other frightened souls are absolutely not real.’ And as she felt herself melt together again with him the thought struck her: then neither was Hugh.

A sharp, painful incident came to mind. Hugh had tried to get her to discuss which of the rooms they should set aside as the ‘fall-out room’ – that Civil Defence leaflet. She had been panicked, and made a stupid scene. Irrational. While he and the boys had played hiding under a table in the spare room, she had just cried. He accused her of mental cowardice. She had felt stupid all the time, living with a clever man like Hugh.

But she was not stupid, and had never considered herself so until marriage. This thought was like the lifting of a great weight. She had permission to be happy, and it was all right.

‘This is a most absorbing topic you’ve raised. Darling. Robert. But I should really rather replace it with kissing. How naked my back feels.’

And so the subject of Stella and all the rest of them was put aside. And they gave themselves over to exploration.

There is a difference between exploration and any other kind of seagoing enterprise. Exploration is the making of charts with the finest of lines. It is never the whole picture – it leaves gaps, intriguing, full of delight. There is fear and danger: it coasts what is perpetually strange. Map-making demands all hands; all intelligence. It is a matter for the most absolute concentration – steering is paramount. It is the act of meeting, of love. I believe so.

‘No,’ Penny said. ‘I have to tell you. I … It was during the storm. I lost … You see, I was going to have a child. Another baby. I must tell you. I was pregnant. I … Do you know, in some extraordinary way I hardly knew. Can you believe that? Something going on inside and you can’t bring yourself to face it. So you don’t. Face it, I mean. I knew somewhere. Do you understand? But at the same time I didn’t know. My body knew, but my brain didn’t. Wouldn’t. Robert. Have I spoiled everything? Do you hate me?’

‘Why should I hate anything about you? I love you.’

‘I don’t know. It’s so vile and messy. And another man’s child. I’m ashamed. You must think of me now with all that mess. I was upset. I was so upset. And do you know part of the thing I was upset about was that I was glad. It’s awful. I must be horrible.’

‘Penny.’

‘I’m not a terrible woman, am I?’

‘No. No, you’re not. Of course not, Penny. Of course not. It’s all right.’ And he wondered where his assurance came from. It was the naturalness between them, he thought.

‘Does it make any difference?’ she said. ‘Men are … Sometimes … Men don’t like … Does it make any difference? I feel … You see I can’t …’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘I’m not a terrible woman, just for loving you? You see, it still hurts.’

‘Of course.’

‘Only a bit, now. It will be all right. It doesn’t make any difference, does it?’

‘How could it? How could it, darling?’

She clung to him.

I have entered responsibility, he thought. Everything I have done and been before, that was irresponsibility. He saw her for the first time clearly as a woman. The things which had troubled him so greatly – her marriage, her children, age – they fell away and no longer made him anxious. Her life was her life. Her lips were delicious; because of what she said. How beautiful were her breasts, her belly – not because they were breasts, but because they were hers; not as a belly, but because he could trace with his fingers the stretch marks left by her children. And below that there was still the pain of the creature her body had given up in the storm.

‘I understand,’ he whispered. ‘I understand.’

The Southern Cross had mounted up. They lay under one of the boats on a combination of her stole and his jacket. ‘It’s the smallest constellation of them all,’ he said. ‘It used to be just visible from the Med – in the time of the Greeks and so on.’

‘Do they move, then? They told us stars were fixed.’

‘There’s a wobble. It’s called the precession.’

‘How extraordinary.’

‘There, do you see? That patch of brilliants. It’s the Jewel Box. And the other famous thing, that dark area. That’s the Coal Sack. The Cross is actually almost absorbed by a larger, the Centaur. But right along,’ and he drew a great arc with his hand, ‘there’s the design of a ship splashed across the Milky Way. That group there is Carina; that’s the keel.’

He led her sight along his finger, and drew it to the right. ‘And Vela, the sails. And there is Puppis, the poop deck right in the stern. So that makes the Crux rather like a flag, doesn’t it. The ensign.’

‘We shall make love, Robert.’

‘What?’

‘You may think it’s obvious. But I want to say it out loud. In case you’re in any doubt.’

‘When I … Before I came down to your cabin. I nearly couldn’t come. My feet wouldn’t move. It’s not … Don’t think there was for a moment any doubt about my feelings. It’s just that … Well, I was so scared. I felt as though I should need to be something of a Casanova. D’you see? The skilled … American hotel films, that sort of thing. I mean in order to … And I’m not, you see. The fact is …’ He turned to look into her eyes. ‘The fact is I’ve never exactly been in the situation – of going into a lady’s … of being exactly in that situation. I’ve never done anything of the kind at all.’

‘Oh, bless you.’ She threw her arms around him. ‘It’s absolutely all right. I said I believe I’ve had quite enough for both of us. I knew what you meant. It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry for a moment, my dearest. We shall be wonderful.’ There was a pause while she thought. ‘So that’s why you’ve spent your life gazing at the stars.’