Singing in the Shrouds Read Online Free PDF

had heard scraps of the Cuddy’s conversation. She had also been conscious of the young man walking just behind her. When they had emerged from the passageway to the wharf he said, “Look, do let me carry that suitcase,” and had taken it out of her hand before she could expostulate. “My stuff’s all on board,” he said. “I feel unimportant with nothing in my hand. Don’t you hate feeling unimportant?”
    “Well, no,” Brigid said, surprised into an unconventional reply. “At the moment, I’m not minding it.”
    “Perhaps it’s a change for you.”
    “Not at all,” she said hurriedly.
    “Or perhaps women are naturally shrinking creatures, after all. ‘Such,’ you may be thinking, ‘is the essential vanity of the human male.’ And you are perfectly right. Did you know that Aubyn Dale is to be a passenger?”
    “Is he?” Brigid said without much interest. “I would have thought a luxury liner and organized fun would be more his cup of tea.”
    “I understand it’s a rest cure. Far away from the madding camera, and I bet you anything you like that in no time he’ll be missing his spotlights. I’m the doctor, by the way, and this is my first long voyage. My name’s Timothy Makepiece. You must be either Miss Katherine Abbott or Miss Brigid Carmichael, and I can’t help hoping it’s the latter.”
    “You’d be in a bit of a spot if it wasn’t,” Brigid said.
    “I risked everything on the one throw. Rightly, I perceive. Is it your first long voyage?”
    “Yes.”
    “You don’t sound as excited as I would have expected. This is the ship, looming up. It’s nice to think we shall be meeting again. What is your cabin number? I’m not being fresh; I just want to put your bag in it.”
    “It’s four. Thank you very much.”
    “Not at all,” said Dr. Makepiece politely. He led the way to her cabin, put her suitcase into it, made her a rather diffident little bow and went away.
    Brigid thought without much interest, “The funny thing is that I don’t believe that young man was putting on an act,” and at once stopped thinking about him.
    Her own predicament came swamping over her again and she began to feel a great desolation of the spirit. She had begged her parents and her friends not to come to the ship, not to see her off at all, and already it seemed a long time ago that she had said good-bye to them. She felt very much alone.
    The cabin was without personality. Brigid heard voices and the hollow sounds of footsteps on the deck overhead. She smelt the inward rubbery smell of a ship.
    How was she to support five weeks of the woman with the pin-heels and the couple with Clapham Common voices and that incredibly forbidding spinster? She unpacked the luggage which was already in her cabin. Dennis looked in and she thought him quite frightful. Then she took herself to task for being bloody-minded and beastly. At that moment she found in her trunk a parcel from a wonderful shop with a very smart dress in it and a message from her mother, and at this discovery she sat down on her bunk and cried like a small girl.
    By the time she had got over that and finished her unpacking she was suddenly quite desperately tired and went to bed.
    Brigid lay in her bed and listened to the sounds of the ship and the port. Gradually the cabin acquired an air of being her own and somewhere at the back of all the wretchedness there stirred a very slight feeling of anticipation. She heard a pleasant voice saying again, “You don’t sound as excited as I would have expected,” and then she was so sound asleep that she didn’t hear the ship sail and was only very vaguely conscious of the fog signal, booming at two-minute intervals all night.
     
    By half-past twelve all the passengers were in bed, even Mrs. Dillington-Blick, who had given her face a terrific workout with a new and complicated beauty treatment.
    The officers of the watch went about their appointed ways and the
Cape Farewell,
sailing dead slow,