Swimming to Ithaca Read Online Free PDF Page B

lifeboat.
    ‘Will we go rowing?’ Paula asked.
    ‘I hope not.’
    They unpacked excitedly, finding neatly hidden cupboards to stow clothes, putting out their washing things neatly round the sink, folding nightclothes under pillows and hanging Dee’s dresses – few and cheap – in the narrow wardrobe. The bathroom was next door. ‘I expect we have to share it with other cabins,’ she told her daughter.
    ‘Will there be other girls for me to play with?’
    ‘Perhaps. Now let’s go up and watch while we set sail.’
    ‘Is it a sailing ship?’
    ‘It’s a steam ship, but that’s what you say – set sail – even if it’s a steam ship. You say different things in a ship. The floor’ – she tapped with the toe of one shoe – ‘is the deck. And this’ – she pointed to the ceiling (she could actually touch it, if she stretched), and her tone was less certain on the point – ‘is the deckhead.’
    A voice came from the Tannoy in the corridor outside, calling all visitors to return to shore. ‘Now come on, let’s go and see. We can wave to Grandpapa and Grandmamma.’
    They hurried on deck. Her parents waved from among the crowd, where families of officers and other ranks were muddled together, because the quayside was the territory of civilian democracy rather than military rank. The moorings – great hawsers of woven steel – were cast off. The distant, submarine rumble of engines rose in pitch and volume and made the deck shiver beneath their feet. Around the stern, where the soldiers were lined up, seawater was churned into the whitenessof dirty washing, while above their heads, from the side of the yellow smokestack, a siren blew like a call for the dead to awaken.
    ‘Wave!’ she cried to Paula. ‘Wave at Grandpapa and Grandmamma! Goodbye, Grandmamma! Goodbye, Grandpapa!’ And Goodbye, England, she might have added. Goodbye many things. She felt a childlike excitement, an emotion that quite matched anything Paula might be feeling. There were two kinds of foreign travel, and until this moment she had experienced neither. There was ‘abroad’ and there was ‘overseas’, and the latter was much the more exciting of the two. ‘Abroad’ could be nothing more than a day trip to Calais, but ‘overseas’ was Empire. What they were doing now was supremely overseas.
    ‘Wave!’ she cried, waving herself, and making out the diminutive spots of her parents’ faces, the two of them stripped of feature by distance and yet, like out-of-focus photos in a newspaper, incontrovertibly those of her mother and father. Faces that she had known and loved and that had always been there when she needed them. Almost always.
    ‘Where are they?’ Paula cried, as though seeing them was somehow important, vital even. ‘I can’t see them. I can’t see! I can’t see!’
    Dee pointed. ‘There. Over there.’ And then, quite suddenly, she couldn’t make them out either. Maybe they had turned away. No, surely not. Surely they would still be waving as, to the trumpeting of its own and other invisible sirens ashore, the
Empire Bude
edged out into the Solent. Somewhere a band still played. ‘Rule Britannia’, that absurd and bumptious tune.
    ‘I can’t see Grandpapa and Grandmamma,’ Paula said. ‘They’ve gone.’
    Clouds hung above the docks like damp, grey blankets overbasins of dirty suds. Gulls wheeled and tilted behind the ship and the quayside where they had embarked diminished as though they were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope, until it was no longer dry land inhabited by waving, weeping people, but had become a mere underscoring of warehouses and cranes, a boundary between the grey sky above and the grey water below.
    She held Paula’s hand tightly. Her eyes stung with tears, but whether they were tears for the parting with her parents, or tears at the absence of Tom, or tears of sadness that she did not feel quite guilty, wasn’t at all clear.
    They stood at the rails to watch