Water

       To London, January 1939

      Although Laura had said, time and again, that there was no need for Mother to come on board, in fact, when the moment came, she was glad that she was not embarking alone. They knew the steamer would be half empty, but half empty was quite crowded enough. Holding her smaller suitcase and pulling her muskrat coat around her, Laura had to push through a throng of middle-aged women just to get onto the pier on the Hudson River. She stumbled on an uneven step as they walked up to the tourist class entrance, and as she righted herself she realised how breathless she felt. Still, Mother being there made her determined not to show her uncertainty, or even at this last moment the whole plan might collapse, and she might be ordered home to wait out Ellen’s recovery. So once on board she tried to walk with more confidence, as if she knew where they were going, up to the information desk where a steward rattled out the directions to her cabin so quickly that she had to ask him to repeat them.

      ‘Take the elevator down one floor, along the corridor to the right, through the double doors …’ As he was talking, Laura couldn’t help noticing the sign above the desk: ‘The company’s regulations prohibit passengers from passing from one class to another. Passengers are therefore kindly requested to refrain from applying for this privilege and to keep within the confines of the class in which booked.’ The steward noticed the direction of her gaze. ‘We do tours, you know,’ he said.

      ‘Tours?’

      ‘Every day, you can visit the first-class deck. Or if you go to the movie, you’ll go into their side.’

      ‘Do they visit us?’

      He laughed as if she had made some kind of joke, and then turned to the impatient elderly couple behind them.

      The smell of old cigarette smoke hit her when she opened the door to her cabin and, putting her toilet case on the bed, Laura stood irresolutely beside it.

      ‘Look, your trunk is already here,’ Mother said, gesturing to the shiny brown box which they had given to a porter at the pier together with her cabin number. Mother always pointed out the obvious, was always fussily one step behind. But Laura was suddenly reluctant for her to leave. It would be so final, to be left here with these things that didn’t look like her things at all. They were all brand new, that was why, bought in the splurge of shopping that had followed the sudden decision that the girls must go to London. Only Laura’s name, written in her carefully neat lettering on the tag, told her the brown trunk was hers. The other bed – that would have been Ellen’s – was a rebuke, but at least it looked as though no one else had booked it. Laura had quailed at the thought of sleeping with a stranger.

      Mother was once again going through things that she had told her before, about how there would be a female steward who would look out for her, how she mustn’t be afraid to let the steward know if anyone bothered her, and how Aunt Dee’s maid would be at Waterloo to meet her. The thought of the maid brought Laura’s anxiety up more sharply than ever. She was almost ready to interrupt the stream of admonitions about telegrams and underwear, food and gratitude, and say that she had changed her mind. Indeed, she had just turned to Mother, about to speak, when they heard the shout along the corridor, ‘All ashore that’s going ashore,’ and Laura’s face reverted to the still expression her mother hated. Contained, as Laura thought. Sulky, as her mother had described it only that morning. Laura opened the door to the corridor.

      They walked together up to the point where the corridor split in two. All of a sudden Mother put her arms around her. They never embraced, and Laura stepped back without thinking. The abruptness of her move was tempered by the press of people converging at that very point; it was not a place to stand, not in the middle of the friends and family who were returning to the pier and the passengers making their way up to the deck. And so the two of them were carried forward in separate streams of movement. Laura thought to herself, I’ll make it better, I’ll wave. She saw herself in her mind’s eye on deck, blowing kisses, borne backwards.

      And she was leaning on the rail, looking for that grey fur hat in the crowd, when a woman beside her stepped right onto her foot. ‘Sorry,’ the woman said without turning, and Laura found herself looking at the curve of a cheek and curls of hatless hair rather than out to the pier. ‘Why is leaving so—’ the woman said, her last word lost in the scream of a whistle that rent the air. Her gesture was not lost, however. She seemed to sum up and then to dismiss the jagged Manhattan skyline as she brought her hands together and flung them apart. The view was full of sunshine and watery reflections, but Laura could not make out where Mother was standing, and she narrowed her eyes at the knots of people, pulling her coat tight around her neck. Then the wind was sharp in her face as the ship began to move, and she took a deep breath. The voyage had begun.

      The woman next to her was wearing only a cloth coat, open over her dress, and a drab knitted scarf, yet she didn’t seem cold. Laura turned to look at her again, but she couldn’t have been more surprised when the woman turned too, and said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘How about getting a drink?’

      Of course Laura had imagined meeting people on board; no young woman could step onto a ship that year and not think of Elinor and her doomed onboard romance in Till My Heart Is Still, which Laura had read in a creased paperback lent to her by a school friend, but she had not imagined such a quick advance into acquaintanceship with a woman who did not seem quite her kind. A part of Laura wanted to go on standing on deck, taking the measure of her solitude and the start of her journey, but the woman’s nonchalance was appealing. So Laura found herself following her into a low-ceilinged, airless lounge on the floor below. As soon as she saw the people – mainly men – at the tables, she paused at the door, but the woman walked forward without hesitation, putting her purse and a book she was holding on a table and sitting down in one of the worn, tapestry-covered chairs.

      When the waiter came up to them, the woman ordered a beer immediately. Laura was slower. She could not pretend that ordering alcohol would be natural for her, and she was thirsty and tired. ‘A cup of coffee, please. And a glass of water.’

      ‘Funnily enough, I was here yesterday – not on the boat, on the pier – welcoming those boys home—’

      ‘You mean—’

      ‘The boys they brought back from Spain. Heroes, one and all.’

      ‘They were brave, weren’t they?’ Laura’s comment was uncertain. She came from a home that was so lacking interest in politics that her father rarely even took a daily newspaper. He voted Republican, she was pretty sure, but she had never felt able to ask him about his views, or why, whenever he mentioned Roosevelt’s name, he sounded so disparaging.