‘Do I? That’s only because of Mother.’
‘You remind me of an English actress I once saw in a movie—’
‘Who?’ She was desperate to know how she might be seen by others. Was there someone she was like? How did she strike people? But to her disappointment they were already at the door of the bar and Florence did not reply. There were not many tables free in the lounge now, but Joe waved to them from a table to their left, where he was sitting with two women. It would have been too pointed to ignore him and so, after a quick look at Laura, Florence walked forwards and Joe pulled chairs up to the table.
Introductions were swift; the two new women were called Maisie and Lily, and Laura commented immediately on their English accents. These two women were clearly sisters, with tightly marcelled auburn hair and wide-apart eyes and small mouths, which gave them a look of almost doll-like innocence. That look was belied by their conversation. One of them was telling a tale about a casting manager for a big New York show where they had been working, who thought he was owed favours by every woman in the chorus.
‘But he could never do the job,’ Maisie said with a mocking tone. ‘What he really liked was being told off for being a naughty boy …’
‘Isn’t that the English vice?’
‘Oh, American men are quite as bad,’ Lily said. Laura and Florence fell silent during the conversation, and quite soon Laura got up to say good night, and again to her pleasure Florence got up too and they went down the corridor together.
‘Wait a minute,’ Florence said at the door of her room, and Laura stood uncertainly as she went in and came out again. ‘I thought you might like to read this – yesterday’s now, but anyway.’ It was a copy of the Daily Worker, which Florence obviously thought more suitable reading for Laura than the Hollywood magazine she had seen in her cabin. Laura thought she might feel criticised, but as she walked down the corridor to her room, she realised that what she actually felt was – what was it? – noticed, singled out, even if found wanting.
And that was why, after carefully wiping the make-up off her face with cold cream, the way that she had learned to do from magazines, Laura lay down in the hard, narrow bed and, despite the discomfort of the swell of the boat, she started reading the newspaper that Florence had given her. Most of the headlines, about delegates and conferences, policies and speeches, were too alien to hold her attention, but on an inside page she found a column about women’s lives, by one Sally Barker, which mentioned the importance of men taking a role in domestic work if their wives were to take their place in the revolution. The writer talked about how too many women were trapped at home in America, while in Russia women were able to take their place next to their menfolk in the factories. ‘There we see no selfish husbands who expect servants rather than companions, and no nagging wives who realise life has passed them by. We see women who proudly go out and put their shoulder to the wheel, and men who are not ashamed to rock the cradle.’ Laura read it idly, but after she had put the newspaper down and turned out her light, its words kept drifting through her mind.
And as she slept, the words of the article seemed to thicken and take shape in her dreams, so that Sally Barker took on the form of one of her old teachers from school. She was sitting, in her dream, with Laura in her own living room at home and they were watching her mother sewing a skirt, but then gradually she realised that her mother was stitching the skirt onto Laura’s own body, and she felt ashamed in case her teacher could see the little stains on the skirt where her blood was seeping. It was a surreal, nonsensical dream, she thought when she woke in the small hours, her heart pounding, but she could still feel her panic. As she woke properly, she realised that it was physical discomfort that had woken her, and she struggled out of the bed and staggered to the bathroom to retch over the toilet. As she lay back down again, the ship’s swell seemed greater than ever, and the room horribly claustrophobic in the darkness, and she lay uneasily until she heard the sounds of people coming and going in the corridor and thought it might be time for breakfast.
In the restaurant there was no sign of Florence or the journalist, and so she sat self-consciously on her own. When the waiter put the toast and coffee in front of her, to her horror she realised that she was feeling ill again, and she had to rush out of the restaurant to the nearest bathroom. As she washed her hands and mouth in the little basin, she saw how tired and pinched her face looked in the mirror, and rather than return to the restaurant she went out onto the deck.
‘Feeling okay?’ a voice said to her from a deckchair, and Laura turned to see Joe sitting there.
‘Not my best,’ she muttered.
‘Sit here and eat this,’ he said, offering her a bag of saltines with a casual gesture. Her instinct was to refuse, but then she realised she longed for one. ‘You’ll feel better soon. The weather’s calming, it was a bit of a rough night, wasn’t it? This ship has the worst vibrations of any I’ve ever known.’
‘Have you done this journey before?’
‘Just once. And once from Southampton to France, and down to Morocco and Egypt.’
Laura asked nothing about his travels, but someone as determined to talk as Joe was not to be put off by a lack of direct questions. He told Laura about the boat he’d taken to north Africa, about the film playing that afternoon in the ship’s cinema, which he had seen the previous week in New York, and he called the steward over for hot coffee. In such loquacious company Laura could relax a little, knowing that nothing was expected of her.
At one point he stopped and looked at the newspaper which Laura had put down at her feet. ‘You’re not a Red too, are you?’
‘Florence gave it to me—’
‘Still, they’re right about some things,’ Joe said, taking the newspaper and looking at the front page. ‘At least they get what’s going on in Europe. They don’t do the “if only, if only” – you know, “if only he was a nicer guy or he would accept this or that” – they can see that kind of stuff is all baloney, that there’s got to be a showdown sooner or later.’
At this, Laura said nothing. She and her mother and sister had all convinced one another that war was a long way off, and even if they had done so simply because they wanted to believe that a trip to London was still possible, the conviction was now hard to throw off. Joe went on talking, about what he couldn’t stand about communism, how they wanted everyone to toe the line. ‘They want everyone to be the same,’ he was saying.
To her own surprise, Laura found herself shaking her head. She had only that one article to go on, but she found herself saying something, which sounded inarticulate even to herself, about how it was everyone else who wanted women to be the same, and it was good if the communists thought that they could be free. Almost as soon as she had started to speak, she tailed off, and Joe laughed and started to tell her she was wrong, and that women wanted to be real women, not workers, but she was hardly listening. It was as though only on saying the word ‘free’ had she realised what she had been thinking all night – and not just that night, but forever, for as long as she could remember – about her home life, about her mother … yes, it was Mother who loomed in her mind, Mother’s nagging, her carping, and even, from time to time, on dark nights full of awful yells and worse silences, her sobbing. She had always resented Mother, always blamed her, but that word ‘free’ had hurt her as soon as she had tried to say it, because it was the word that Mother had spoken once, on the one occasion she had tried to speak to Laura seriously, she had told her not to give up her freedom as she had done. Freedom. What had Mother given up? As the unbidden memories crackled through Laura’s mind, she closed her eyes, the cracker she was eating an inedible lump in her mouth, and she heard Joe asking if she was going to be ill, and she made herself open her eyes and smile. That’s what you do, you stay quiet, you open your eyes, you smile. Whatever you do, you never open the door to the place where the yells and the sobbing can be heard. ‘I guess you’re right,’ she said quietly, as Joe told her that women didn’t want to have to work in the same way men did, and that communists had no idea what women really wanted.