Authors: Julia Gregson
Tilbury Docks, October 17, 1928
T
he
Kaisar-i-Hind
was a swarming hive of activity by the time Tor and Rose arrived. Red-turbaned lascars flew around with luggage; crates of fruit and boxes of food were being hauled up the gangplank; bells were ringing; and on the quay, a pensioner band was wheezing its way through “Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?” And all Tor could do was smile and try not to stare too openly at all the men walking up the gangplanks: sunburned men in naval uniforms; old colonels bundled up against the cold; clever, pale men, young civil servants; and one heavenly looking man, who looked half-Indian, in the most beautiful cashmere coat, who turned and gave her what she was sure was a meaningful look.
Oh, it was almost unbearable to feel this excited.
Close to the gangplank, Rose’s parents stood conversing quietly with Miss Viva Holloway, who had been joined by a tall pale boy in a long dark coat, her other charge. Tor saw him glance at her mother, who was making a noisy hand-waving
fuss about boarding passes and trunks, but today she hardly gave a damn.
All of them had flown around for most of the morning exploring the ship, which was astoundingly spacious and opulent. “Quite like a first-class hotel,” her mother kept saying. “I mean, very like the
Meurice
.” Its gleaming wooden floors smelled of fresh polish; it had deep armchairs in smoking rooms, lushly painted murals in the dining room, Persian carpets, fresh flowers, and when they walked in to look at the dining salon, a buffet was already being laid out with huge turkeys and hams and a sweet trolley, quivering with blancmanges, and neiges au crème, fruit salads, and—Tor’s favorite—lemon meringue pie.
Her mother had gasped with admiration and then spoiled it by stage-whispering, “
Somebody
will be in their element.” And then, “Darling, please do try not to overdo it, there is
no more money
for any frocks.”
And for once, Tor’s silent father had taken her side. “Leave her alone, Jonti,” he’d said, his voice throbbing with emotion. “Don’t go on at her today.”
At the clang of a loud bell, the pulse of the ship had quickened; feet scampered above their heads, orders were shouted, the music on the quayside swelled to a sobbing pitch, and her parents had been sent ashore.
Tor’s last view of her mother had been of her standing on the quay, a few feet away from her father, tiny and determined, a colored streamer caught in her fur tippet. When Tor looked down, her mother looked up, lifted her bosom and gave her a significant look. “
Posture,
” her mother mouthed and Tor had immediately straightened up.
Her performing seal,
she’d thought bitterly,
right up until the end.
Then the band had played a rousing farewell and suddenly she’d felt this lurch, like a giant heartbeat, and they were off.
And while other passengers had wept and waved and strained their eyes toward the shore until their people were dots, Tor’s heart had floated upwards and outwards in an ecstasy of flight. She was free.
An hour later, Rose and Tor stood in a thumping wind on A deck clinging to each other. The seagulls that had followed them from Tilbury were, one by one, turning to go home.
Rose’s new coat suddenly ballooned above her head, making them both laugh a little too wildly.
“Are you all right?” Tor said. Rose looked as if she’d been crying.
“Yes, Tor, I’m fine—excited—
really.
But I do think I’ll go down to the cabin now and unpack. What about you?”
“I’ll be down in five minutes,” said Tor. “I’m about to throw my corset into the drink.”
Rose scrunched up her eyes and tried to laugh. “Your mother will kill you.”
“She can’t swim,” said Tor, flashing her great headlamp eyes. “
Shame.
”
The corset. Her mother had brought a new one up to Tor’s room while she was packing and laid it on the bed like a shriveled pink baby.
“I brought it back from Paris,” her mother whispered, “as a surprise. It’s called a waspy and makes your waist
comme ça.
” She’d given a silly conspiratorial smile and held her hands in a tiny circle. “If you don’t wear it under your peach crêpe de chine it really will look like a rag, and I warn you, Ci Ci Mallinson is very, very smart,” she’d said, bringing up their dragon hostess in Bombay yet again.
And in spite of all her good intentions not to row before
she left, Tor had raised her voice and said, “Mummy,
nobody
wears them now,” which of course was not true, and then she’d added illogically, “Besides, if my brains are melting in the heat I shan’t be able to.”
For a second, Tor had expected to be struck across the face, her mother could be free with her fists when riled, but all she’d said was
“Oh, pouf.”
She’d waved her away with her hand like some sort of nasty fly, and Tor had seen pure contempt in her eyes, which in a way was worse than anger.
Be fat and ugly then,
her mother might as well have added,
I give up.
“Darling.” A wan-looking Rose joined her on the deck again. “This is so stupid, but I can’t find Miss Holloway, or our cabin—they all look the same to me.”
She was trying hard to smile and keep the wobble out of her voice, but poor Rose was in quite a state, Tor could see that. At school, Rose had always been the calmly efficient one, packing Tor’s pencils and finding forgotten homework; now Tor was the one holding Rose’s hand as they wove their way down the deck, both feeling slightly nauseous. As the wind drew them in a sucking motion toward the steps, she saw the strange boy who’d been with Miss Holloway earlier, sitting on his own on a deck chair. He was staring out to sea and, at the same time, tapping his foot rhythmically as though he was listening to a piece of music.
“Oh, hello,” said Rose, “we’re looking for Miss Holloway. Have you any idea where she is?”
“Not the foggiest,” he said. “Sorry.” He turned away from them and looked intently at the sea again.
“Gosh, how
rude,
” Rose said as they walked down the stairs toward the purser’s office. “I jolly well hope we don’t have to eat every meal with him.”
“We don’t,” Tor said firmly. “Because I won’t. I’ll talk to Miss Viva Holloway about it. I’ll make some excuse.”
At the bottom of the steps, a brick-faced colonel was giving orders to a tiny lascar seaman who was struggling with his trunk: “Left hand down, hard at it, jolly good, well done!” A smart woman was checking her lipstick in a mirror and saying to a small boy, “Yes, it is rough but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
It would take them all a while to settle in.
“I’m afraid we’ve been very silly and lost our keys,” Rose told the purser, who was instantly charmed by her. Rose had that effect on men: a dewy softness, a tentative confiding air that made them melt. He said he was going off duty but would take them down to their cabins. He led them past the bar where a band was playing “Ain’t She Sweet?” and then past the dining salon where waiters in snowy-white uniforms buzzed about setting tables.
“First journey east?” he asked Tor impersonally.
“Yes,” Tor said. “My friend is about to be married, and I’m chief bridesmaid.”
“That sounds very nice,” he said. “Bombay or Delhi?”
“Bombay.” She felt she had taken on somebody else’s life.
They went up a flight of carpeted stairs and then up a narrow corridor smelling faintly of petrol.
“There you go, ladies,” he said. “B thirty-four, your cabin. Your chaperone is in B thirty-six. Mr. Glover is next door to you in B thirty-five. Bon voyage.”
Alone in their cabin, Rose and Tor sat on opposite bunks and grinned at each other. The tiny room was already chaotic, they’d been down earlier and left heaps of clothes on the floor, too excited to unpack properly. Now they examined in detail the twin brass beds, the rich-looking monogrammed blankets,
the Lilliputian chest of drawers. Rose hung her wedding dress, a swinging corpse in its cloth bag, on the outside of the cupboard. “I’ll give it to the purser later,” she assured Tor. “It takes up too much space here.”
They lay on their beds in silence for a moment, exhausted by the day. Tor had taken the bed next to the porthole through which she could see the tumbling sea. Rose said she’d rather be closer to the bathroom.
They were chattering again when there was a knock on the door, and their tiny steward walked in (“I mean
literally
monkey-sized,” Rose wrote in a subsequent letter home, “in this wonderful blue and white uniform”). He smiled at them radiantly. “My name is Suday Ram,” he said. “Babies want bat?”
“Sorry?” Rose said politely. “I didn’t quite catch that.”
Tor knew she mustn’t look at Rose; they were both in a mood to giggle.
“Do babies want
bat
?” he repeated more firmly.
He took them into the miniature bathroom, which had thick white towels and new soaps. He showed them how to get the rust-colored seawater out of the taps and how to flush the water closet, which was most embarrassing. When he left, they exploded with laughter and said “Baby want bat” several times until they’d perfected their Indian accents, and Tor was so happy to see Rose laughing. She’d been crying again, she could see that, even though Rose would rather die than admit it.
“Rose,” she said in her Indian voice when the man was gone. “Go back into the bathroom, rub your tummy, and make a wish. I have big surprise.”
When she heard the bolt slide, Tor took the most magical thing she possessed out of her trunk and held it reverently in her arms. Its red leather box, with the little dog Nipper and a horn inscribed on its lid, still made her tremble with happiness.
“Don’t come out yet,” she said. She removed the pair of silk stockings she’d put into the horn chamber to keep it from getting dented. “Eyes tight shut!” She took a tin out of the silk pocket in the lining and took the red (loud) needle from a square of cotton wool. A few seconds later, the cabin exploded with the pratfall squeaks and bangs of J. B. White’s “Shoo Fox.”
“Oh, Tor.” Rose Charlestoned out of the bathroom in her stockinged feet. “Thank God,
thank God
you’re here.”
They danced together for a while and then collapsed on the bed.
“Oh bother!” Rose’s wedding dress was falling in a silken avalanche onto the floor. “I must put it away.”
“Yes, yes, yes.” Tor poured them both a crème de menthe and they lay on the bunk together, with their eyes shut, feeling the ship speeding them onward. “Let’s forget about all that for a while.”
Then Tor read the letter from their captain that had been left on their beds.
“We’re invited to a cocktail party tonight, in the Taj Room. Voyage out will take three weeks. We’ll stop at Gibraltar, Marseilles, Malta, Port Said, and Bombay. Dancing each night in the Persian Room to the Savoy Havana Band.
“No second-class passengers to even think of showing their common little mugs in first class,” Tor continued, “and there will be fancy-dress parties, deck quoits and bridge evenings, a talk on snakebites and sunstroke in the Simla Bar given by Lieutenant Colonel Gorman when we get to Port Said. Dinner jackets and long dresses to be worn each night. Oh! And fornication.”
“Oh, Tor, stop it.” Rose took a sip from her glass and then put it down. “What’s that?” she said. There was a great creaking noise coming from the direction of the porthole, followed by the thud of an engine, the running of feet above their heads.
“Only the wind, my lovely.” Tor glanced toward the porthole, toward the waves, gray and tumbling. “Following us into the fathomless depths.”
“I shan’t have any more crème de menthe,” said Rose, who was looking a bit green.
“Well, I will,” said Tor, “otherwise I might just die of excitement.”
Bay of Biscay
T
he sea: long glistening hollows laced with creamy foam; broken ice creams, clamor, bang, smack of waves. Reptilian hiss of ship as it glides through sea. Color of potato peelings at Tilbury, now a deep dense green.
“NO CLICHÉS,” Viva Holloway wrote in capital letters in her new leather-bound journal. “GET ON WITH SOME PROPER WORK.”
This habit of writing bossy notes to herself often surfaced at times of strain. When she was a child, and at her convent boarding school in Wales, she’d imagined them being dictated by her father, Alexander Holloway, railway engineer, late of Simla, who was in heaven but looking down on her, monitoring her progress. Later, in London, where she’d arrived at the age of eighteen, this moving finger moved, too, full of advice on how she should survive this big bad city where she knew nobody and was frighteningly poor; it was always ready to tick her off about dithering or regrets or extravagance or self-pity.
She turned the page and wrote:
THINGS TO DO IN INDIA
“You must NOT go to Simla,” she bossed herself in the margin, “until you have earned enough money to do so.
Very bad idea
!”
Money was something she worried about constantly. Guy Glover’s aunt had promised to send her one hundred and sixty pounds in a banking order before the ship left, but the posts had come and gone, and the fare plus the money for their train tickets had come from her own dwindling savings.
At the last moment her old employer, Nancy Driver, had slipped a ten-guinea bonus into the leather journal that had been her farewell present. She’d been given twenty-five pounds by Rose’s mother and twenty-five pounds from Tor’s, but now survival depended on her being able to supplement her income by writing articles.
She turned another page and took a deep breath. She was sitting in the far corner of the ship’s writing room where, at other lamp-lit desks set at discreet distances from her own, a handful of other passengers were dutifully scratching away. From where she sat, she could see gray waves and gray skies and a horizon that moved up and down like pantomime scenery. They were in the Bay of Biscay, and the steward who had ushered her in here had cheerfully assured her that the waves would get rougher as the morning went on, a piece of intelligence she was determined to ignore.
“THE FISHING FLEET by Viva Holloway,” she wrote in bold letters at the top of the page; she added a fancy squiggle to both
F
s while she put the top of her pen in her mouth.
“There are, roughly speaking, three kinds of women on board the
Kaisar-i-Hind,
” she began.
She stared out to sea for a while, trying to decide whether she would post this, or try to send it by telegram, which would be shockingly expensive. Its final destination would be a shabby bedsit in Bloomsbury, where
The Voice,
a feminist magazine begun by two suffragette sisters, Violet and Fiona Thyme, had its headquarters. Mrs. Driver had introduced her.
If they liked the story, the sisters had promised to pay her ten pounds for one thousand words. “Forget elephant hunts and spicy smells, dear,” said Violet, who had once been to jail with Emily Pankhurst, and who smoked small cheroots. “Lift the lid on what really happens to all those women going to India, and what they think they’ll do when the whole thing collapses.”
“First,” wrote Viva, “there are the memsahibs—the name in Hindi means ‘the master’s women,’ all of whom are traveling on this ship by first class.” (“Check there is a second class,” she wrote in the margin, for she hadn’t had much time yet to explore.)
“I have seen them in the ship’s elegant dining room, and their plumage is quite varied—some favoring the more dowdy feathers of the shires: dun-colored tweeds, silk dresses in various shades of potato, sensible shoes, and thick stockings. Some look as if their hearts have already been half-broken by India. Others are extremely elegant, maybe they already know there will be little else to do when they get there but go to the club, the tennis court, or the shoot, where the same small crowd will watch each other with hawklike fascination and be quietly determined not to let themselves fall behind in the fashion stakes. Next, we have the skittishly nervous young girls who are collectively and unkindly called the Fishing Fleet. They are going to India to look for husbands, and they’ve been going there with their hooks baited ever since the early nineteeth century.”
(“When exactly? You must talk to them” she scrawled in the margin.)
“Most come after the London season is over and where, presumably, they have fallen at the first fence of that glorified marriage market. India, where men of their class outnumber women by three to one, will be their last chance to find a husband.”
She put down her pen for a while and thought of Rose, who smelled of Devonshire violets, and who was, Tor was right, ravishingly pretty. She seemed to epitomize a peculiarly British kind of innocence: fine-skinned, appealingly shy, unsure of men.
On their first night at sea, she’d gone down to the girls’ cabin to see if they were all right. The door was unlocked, and when she’d put her head round the door, she’d found Rose lying facedown on the bed quietly weeping. The girl had leaped up immediately and mumbled something about her brother, or maybe it was her father—that poor man had looked so devastated as she’d left—and apologized for being such a wet. And Viva had experienced what she imagined it felt like to have a maternal impulse; she had longed to put her arms around her, but knew it would embarrass them both.
She’s petrified,
she thought.
And why not?
“For some, this could turn out to be a voyage into nightmare: it was vessels like these that took those who were hacked to death in Cawnpore out to India. Others will discover what it is like to want to die of heat; or they may be shot at, or have their children die of tropical diseases or taken away from them at an early age and educated half a world away.”
Viva put her pen down. This, of course, would be the natural moment to tell them about her own father’s death. Or not. Experience had taught her that telling meant enduring other people’s moistly sympathetic looks, their embarrassment, the long accounts of other people they knew who’d lost people abroad,
or, worst of all, attempts to think of some uplifting moral that would make sense of it all. And besides, the car-crash story now tripped off her tongue so easily it felt almost real.
“And next, there are women like myself: single women with no sahib and no wish for one, who love India and like to work. You see, nobody ever really writes about them—the governesses, the schoolteachers, the chaperones—but we have our tales to tell, too.”
“True,
all
like to work?????” she scribbled to herself. Well, it would do for now. She was about to describe their plumage, which in her case was quite atypical. Now she’d returned the woolly tweeds to Mrs. Driver, she was back in her own clothes—that morning, a scarlet silk dress, a dark ballet top left over from school, and a barbaric-looking silver necklace inherited from her mother.
All of a sudden, her mouth filled with liquid and she put her pen down as the floor rose and fell along with her stomach. She glanced at the leaping room, its lamps and green leather desks—when did leather ever smell so sickening?—to see how the other passengers were doing. The walls creaked as she stood up. How hot-making! Not thirty-six hours out from Tilbury and she was going to be sick.
“Excuse me, madam.” A waiter appeared with a gray and pink box and a glass of water.
Oh no! Was it that obvious? She sat back with her eyes closed, trying not to feel the suck and swell of the waves.
Breathe! Breathe!
She tried not to listen to the faint tinkle of the glasses or the stupid laughter of people who thought rough weather was funny or the woman in the booth next to her who was asking for “a plate of egg sandwiches and some Earl Grey.” Egg sandwiches,
uuggggh,
how disgusting.
“Missy.” The waiter stood at the door. He smiled kindly at her as she stumbled out onto the deck and into the deafening boom of the waves.
“Thank you. I’m fine, thank you.”
She rested her forehead on the railings and stayed there until she felt slightly better. The phrase she had been about to write swam mockingly in her head, the words dancingly disconnected. “You see I was not made for marriage, I was born with a knapsack on my back.”
The steward brought her a deck chair and a rug. When she was sitting down, she thought, briefly, about Ottaline Renouf, one of her heroines, who’d gone halfway around the world in an eccentric variety of crafts: Danish fishing boats, banana boats, trawlers, Turkish caïques, never once mentioning seasickness. What if she wasn’t strong enough for this? What would that mean?
By the time she stood up the sky was one huge gray and yellow bruise over the still-rearing waves. Night was falling and the lights had gone on. From the ship she could hear laughter and faint arpeggios of piano music rising and falling. How tinny it sounded against the animal roars of the waves.
When she looked up again, she saw Guy Glover sitting on a deck chair behind a glass screen that sheltered him from the worst of the wind. He was wearing his black overcoat and smoking a cigarette. When he saw her looking at him, he held her gaze for a moment and raised his cigarette to his mouth. The look in his eye said
Try and stop me.
He inhaled deeply and exhaled, making a fishy shape with his lips as the wind blew his smoke ring away. He ground the cigarette under his heel and sauntered over to her. Pathetic, she thought, in his too large coat, trying hard to be what? Perhaps Valentino in
The Sheik,
complete with cape and dagger in boot, or maybe a rake on his first night at sea trying to decide which virgin to take to bed.
He’s just a child,
she tried to reassure herself, for the sight of him had made her anxious again,
a foolish self-conscious child. Nothing to be frightened of.
She’d shared a similar background, and her current thinking about him went as follows: like many boys of his class and background, he’d been turfed from the nest too young. Without parents on hand, or, in his case, siblings to chivvy him along, he’d become a permanent defensive guest, unsure of his welcome, uneasy in his skin. Underneath the studied indifference, the coldness, there was, she was almost certain of it, a boy hungry for love, angry about having to ask for it. She should at least try to understand him even if she couldn’t like him.
“I meant to tell you,” he shouted over the waves, “there’s some people on board my parents want me to say hello to. The Ramsbottoms from Lucknow. They’ve asked us for a drink in the music room tomorrow night. I’d like you to come, too.”
Well, well, well, he’d made one unsolicited remark to her.
“Of course,” she said. “Perhaps you and I and the girls can have dinner together at the early sitting first. We can all get to know each other.”
As she said this, she wondered again whether she should have warned the girls to lock their cabin, just in case Guy was still a little on the light-fingered side.
He looked startled. “I’d rather not do that,” he said. “I don’t want to eat with other people.”
“Why not?”
He mumbled something that the waves drowned out.
“I can’t hear you,” she shouted.
“My parents said we’d be eating alone,” he shouted so hectically that she took a step back.
“Shall we talk about this later?” She felt too sick to lock horns with him now, or to think about food for that matter, and the girls were hardly going to mind.
“Of course.” He beamed his blank and insulting smile and shouted something else about parents that was swept away by
the wind. He was going to be a handful; there was no doubt about it.
After this exchange, Viva went down to the cabin she was sharing with a Miss Snow, a whispery and apologetic schoolteacher who was going back to teach in a school near Cochin. The two had come to this arrangement in order to save money, but hadn’t yet exchanged more than a handful of words.
Miss Snow was asleep under a mound of bedclothes with a green pail underneath her bed. Viva put a damp flannel on her own head and lay down on her bunk and thought about Guy again and all the sympathetic things she’d thought about him earlier flew out of her mind. The scary thing was, she thought, that Guy Glover was her creature now, her responsibility and no doubt her punishment for the lies she’d told.
A wave of anxiety swept over her. Why in God’s name had she taken all this on, particularly at a time when she had, at last, achieved a kind of independence?
It couldn’t surely just be for the chance to open that wretched trunk—Mrs. Waghorn couldn’t have been more frank about the chances of her finding anything in it—but she had flung her life onto this slender thread. Why?
She thought back almost longingly to her basement flat in Nevern Square, not an abode of bliss, to be sure, with its gas ring and narrow bed, but a home nevertheless.
Her bathroom, shared with an elderly librarian and a woman who had an unusual number of gentleman callers, was behind a curtain in the hallway. It had a rough green bath, and was full of damp and dripping stockings and odd ends of slimy soap and a rusting green boiler called the Winterbourne, which, when you touched its innards with a match, exploded like a volcano for three scorching minutes and then went achingly cold.