‘Voyages can be a most dreadful bore, Vee, plenty of time to write the story of your life.’
Vee had thanked her and had dutifully packed the journal together with a bottle of ink and her fountain pen. She had done so mechanically, with no intention of writing a word. Now she was desperate to find them, they must be there somewhere.
Here they were, in a drawer with her hankies, stowed away in a stupid place by Pigeon.
She cleared the table in front of the mirror of books, packets of cigarettes, magazines and a jar of cream and took out the bottle of ink and the leather-backed notebook, and sat down. Then she unscrewed the barrel of the fountain pen and dunked it in the pot of ink, squeezing the filler and watching the dark liquid being drawn up; she’d loved fountain pens ever since she was a girl.
It was a good pen, it suited the paper. Now all she had to do was to write.
My life, she said to herself, doodling the figure of an angel on the receipt for the ink. Who was she writing this for? For posterity? For her family? For Henry? To explain herself to an astonished world?
Or for protection. No diaries, no written records, never commit anything to paper, no letters, nothing that anyone could ever find that would reveal a scrap of information about your private life, that was the rule. Only, if she put it down in writing, with all the details, then if anything did happen to her—
She winced as she thought of the great propellers and the foaming water around them, and that ghoulish little boy of Henry’s, so like his father to look at, telling her with enthusiasm how anything that got in the way of propellers would be sliced up and the ship would barely register a judder in its deepest workings, nothing that anyone would ever notice.
‘Even if you managed to keep clear of the propellers, if you went overboard, then you still wouldn’t drown,’ he’d added. ‘It’s the sharks who get you first, long before you drown.’
She wasn’t going to think about it. She was deliberately keeping clear of the decks, of the rails, where once her delight on board ship was to stand for hours at the rails, looking down into the shifting colours and movement of the sea, green and foaming, or darkest blue, or even, as so often in the Atlantic, grey and forbidding.
‘Mummy will die one day,’ he’d said, his face suddenly troubled. ‘Everybody will. They get old, like people do, and then they’re gone. That’s everyone, even Mummy and Daddy.’
She’d consoled him. ‘Mummy and Daddy won’t die for years and years, not until you’re grown up and have children of your own to worry about.’
‘If there’s a war, and Daddy goes to fight the Germans, then he could be killed.’
What could you say to that, except that it was the truth?
‘Sometimes, very important soldiers, like your daddy, don’t get sent out to fight. They’re too valuable to lose, so they stay at Headquarters and make sure things are done properly.’
‘Not Daddy. He isn’t a coward, he won’t want a desk job, not if there’s a real war.’
Probably not.
She was writing it for herself. So that, if anything happened to her – and she thought again of those great, relentless propellers – someone might read it, and say: ‘I understand.’
Perhaps Alfred was in her mind at that moment, although she wouldn’t admit it to herself. Of all the people she knew who deserved an explanation, Alfred was the one whose opinion she most cared about. Although she hoped that Lally, if she ever came to read it, might think of her with compassion rather than hatred. It would take a saint to be so forgiving, but then Lally was a remarkable woman.
And Claudia? Claudia was out of the same mould as herself, although their fanaticism had taken different directions, it was, at root, the same. A burning desire for a cause greater than oneself. Perhaps her cousin Lucius’s madness came from his mother’s side, after all, and not from those generations of lunatic earls, perhaps folly was in her blood, and in Claudia’s.
There was no excuse there for what she had done.
Well, she would write it down. As her dream had shown her, her life over the last few years would come pouring out in a wave of painfully sharp memories, given half the chance. Those would fill her mind, while her pen could trace the mere bones of her life during those eventful and mistaken years.
Vee hadn’t seen Claudia for five or six years. In those days, her cousin had been a fair, chubby, awkward creature with a mouthful of ironwork and protuberant pug-dog eyes – although those were of an intense and dazzling blue that caused pangs of envy in Vee’s breast. In comparison, she felt that her own almost black eyes, an inheritance from her French grandmother, were dull and commonplace.
Vee’s train from York had got into Oxford railway station half an hour ago, and she had crossed from the up platform to the other side, to wait for the train from London. The down platform at three o’clock on that bright October afternoon was almost deserted. A porter leaned against his trolley, squinting into the slanting sunlight as he watched for the arrival of the 1.49 express from London. The station cat was sunning itself in feline abandon on the meagre flowerbed at the end of the platform. A passenger in a trilby and a green mackintosh waited beside a battered suitcase.
She walked along the platform to the chocolate machine and put in a penny for a Nestlé bar. She unwrapped it, took a bite, then put the remains of the chocolate into her coat pocket. She wasn’t hungry. What she was, she realized, feeling the butterflies in her tummy, was nervous. Nervous about coming to Oxford, nervous about meeting new people, nervous about the work, fearing that everyone else would turn out to be much cleverer than she was. They, and her tutors, would despise such stupidity and wonder how she had ever managed to get a place at the university.
And what a miracle it seemed that she was here at all, after the flat refusal of her grandfather to let her go to university. It was thanks to Claudia that she was here, it was Claudia who had announced to her own astonished and disapproving family that no, she wasn’t going to become a debutante, she wasn’t going to stay in London and do the season.
The day that the letter from Aunt Lettice breaking this piece of news came had been a red-letter day for Vee, if a wretched disappointment for her parents.
‘I don’t know what your grandfather will say,’ her father said,
Vee knew exactly what he would say, and she didn’t care. If she weren’t going to London, then, she said, she’d just have to hang around at home. No, thank you, Mummy, no Swiss finishing school for her, she’d feel out of place with all those rich girls.
‘You must speak to your father,’ Mrs Trenchard said to her husband. ‘Perhaps, in the circumstances, a year or two at university …’
He must let me go, Vee said to herself. She went to the Minster and knelt and prayed and prayed, feeling that it was somehow wrong to pray so desperately for oneself, but if God didn’t help her, who would?
‘In the end, she should do what she wants,’ she overheard her mother say to her father. ‘It isn’t as if she were a beauty, or had any special talent. A season would have done her good, she might have caught some young man’s eye, but I can’t ask Lettice to present her if Claudia isn’t going to be a debutante. We both have daughters who are a disappointment to us. Only Lettice is fortunate, she has the other girls.’
Daisy hung in the air.
Vee