The Invitation(26)

‘I don’t want you to go.’ I hate the way I sound, like a child. But I feel like a child. I am afraid. I don’t want to be left alone.

*

I wake. I’m not lying down, as I should be. I’m crouched over. Beneath me not a mattress, but something hard and unyielding.

It takes me several seconds to realize that I am not in my father’s study, nor bleeding in the dirt by the side of a road outside Madrid, but kneeling on the deck of the yacht in my nightdress. I remind myself. It is 1953. I am Stella Truss – not Estrella, the girl I left in Spain. I stand, my limbs stiff with cold, shivering in my thin nightgown. Thank goodness, no one else appears to be about.

This is my own fault. I have pills I could take, to prevent the sleepwalking, but I stopped taking them because I began to feel they were making me stupid when I was awake.

It has been happening more and more of late. The dreams have been more vivid, too. There are memories that will react to suppression by finding any and every fissure to flow through. If one is not careful, they have the power to drown.





9


Hal’s eyes are sore with lost sleep. If he has slept at all, it can only have been an hour or so. At some point in the early hours of the morning he was certain that he heard movement on the deck above him: a kind of shuffling tread. Roberto, probably. But there is something almost otherworldly about it. Perhaps it is simply the way in which, away from the land, everything takes on a slightly changed quality. He had forgotten this. It had been that way on Lionheart. He remembers lying like this at the beginning, listening to the foreign sounds of the ship. Small creaks amplified into almost human groans. Wind trapped and fractured and funnelled, producing strange distortions. When the cruiser was right up near the Norwegian coast, on patrol, a superstition went about that they were being haunted by the ghost of a Viking warlord. You could hear him at night, they said, howling about the quarterdeck. You could hear something, too, though probably due only to a shift in the wind. But one night the men on watch claimed that they had seen him, green as the aurora borealis. And Hal had written a short story about him. He was a captain, he wrote, mourning his sunken ship. Any craft that passed over his watery grave would carry him with them, for a while. Morris had read it, and declared it quite brilliant.

He met Morris in the first week, while looking for a place to sling his hammock. He had quickly learned that there was a hierarchy – not of the official kind, but of the sort he recalled from school: one imposed purely by the ratings themselves. All of the best spots were taken by the men who had served for the longest. Then the next longest and so forth. He had wandered the maze of compartments, finding suspended forms filling every space like huge chrysalises – and not a spare square metre anywhere. He would have to leave the main deck completely.

‘Anyone know of a spot elsewhere?’

No answer: many of the men were already asleep, or disinclined to help, now that they were comfortably tucked up.

‘Over here, lad.’

A figure was emerging from one of the far-most hammocks like a giant spider – one of the longest pairs of legs Hal had ever seen. Finally the man stood there, tall and lanky, a largish nose, amiable face.

‘You can have this spot for the first week – I’ll go sleep in the Capstan flat. No one wants to be on his tod for the first few days.’

Hal had seen the space the man meant: cluttered with cable-winding machinery, as frigid as a refrigerator.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Don’t ask me again – I might change my mind. But I could do with a spell without Bennett’s snoring, anyway. And I don’t mind the cold.’

He would think, later, of the horrible irony of Morris saying this. It would have been the cold that killed him first.

He had thought Morris was little more than a big-hearted joker at first: a man who was always being ribbed by the other men for something – his nose, his constant talk about his new wife, Flora, or his seasickness (he suffered dreadfully, almost constantly). But then Hal learned, from another rating, that Morris wrote stories of his own, and asked to read one. It had made the hairs stand up on his arms. It had made him envious. He had always wanted to be able to write like that, with that concision, and had never managed it. Every time he tried it had come out like a spoof. But Morris’ style was absolutely his own. Here was this rare talent, hidden inside this clumsy vessel. He had books, too: a veritable lending library. Some of the men thought him a bit soft, at first, because of it. But when the long, uneventful days came and sunk them in boredom, they began to ask, somewhat sheepishly, what Morris might recommend.

Back at home, Morris was a postman. You saw all sorts, he said, on the round. In London in particular: where there was such a density of life, in which rich and poor, old and young lived so near to one another. By the end of the day he would have ten, twenty stories clamouring to be told – it was a question of which one you chose. He would scribble the ideas down and then, later, he would work over them on his solitary day off. It would be more difficult when Flora had the baby, certainly. But that was life for you, getting in the way, wonderful chaos.

Hal had been humbled by it.

*

It is still early, the light through the porthole thin and grey. He washes, dresses. Up on deck he finds Roberto, smoking morosely at the bow.

‘Very bad weather,’ he says, as soon as he sees Hal – as though he has been waiting for hours to impart this news.