The White Voyage Read Online Free PDF Page A

nothing. A faint smile was on her lips.
    ‘How would you like that?’ Carling asked.
    He knew what one could expect of a woman; an ordinary woman would have shown him her delight, pulled his head down to her breast, kissed him and fondled him, in gladness and pride that her husband should sacrifice all that had been important in his life for the single joy of being with her continually. But an ordinary woman would not have been worth the sacrifice.
    ‘Well,’ he said, ‘do you think I should do it?’
    ‘We do what we have to do,’ Tove said. The smile faded, and was replaced by graveness, by sadness almost. ‘Come back to me soon, Eiler. Don’t be long away.’
    ‘Two weeks,’ he said.
    ‘So long?’
    She spoke in a childish, wondering tone. In annoyance, he said: ‘You know how long the trip is. It’s no more than usual. I will be here less than half an hour after we dock. I cannot be here sooner.’
    He spoke the final sentence with more emphasis. She would never go with him to the ship, or meet him there, as some of the women did. It had been an early disappointment; an affront to the pride with which he had pictured her standing there, for all the world and his shipmates to see. But she was Tove, and her uniqueness enthralled him.
    ‘Be as quick as you can,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be alone.’
    As he had prepared to get up she had suddenly stretched up her arms to him and clung, kissing him with a wild passion.
    And that had been the end. Nothing more. Only the stunning, inescapable fact. No letter. No motive. No answer now to any of the questions – to love no requital.
    Carling clutched the rail in his agony, feeling the cold, wet metal sting his skin. Nothing made sense unless there was an answer, somewhere, somehow. She could not have left him like that without a reason. The need to know, to understand, had grown instead of lessening in the year that had passed since. It was Tove who had gone, but it was he that was the restless ghost, doomed to walk until his cry was answered. This demand, this urgency, had moved into the centre of his being, and stayed there, like a cancer, devouring all other thoughts and feelings. Once again she had not spoken, at Mrs Guire’s, but if he had waited … The lights of Dublin coalesced into a fading star. Next time, next time she must speak.
    And say what?
    Carling shook his head. The thought probed deep and struck, touching fear that was an open wound. He swayed to and fro. He heard a thin cry, like a gull’s call, against the sounds of wind and water, and the throb of the engines. It was his own voice, naked and involuntary.

Chapter Three
    The last two passengers were listed as Mr and Mrs Henry Jones. He was the elder, by perhaps fifteen years, a man in his early forties, with greying hair and a thickening waistline; he wore heavy-sided glasses and had the glib, worried look of an unsuccessful businessman. Mrs Jones was dark and rather thin. She wore a black and white check coat, open since the weather remained mild, and beneath that a red jersey under a navy suit. She carried a sturdy and well-worn leather handbag. Thorsen put her down as the kind of Englishwoman whose dress allowance is what she can save from a barely adequate housekeeping budget.
    They stayed on deck to watch the ship sail. It was eleven o’clock and the sun, which had been only lightly filmed by the fast-moving clouds, broke through them at last. They stood on the starboard side, aft of the bridge.
    ‘We’re off, then,’ she said.
    ‘Yes.’
    He looked not at her but at the water bubbling away from the ship’s sides beneath them. Heights were inclined to make him dizzy. He had a moment’s fear that his glasses would fall off into the sea, and pushed them on more firmly.
    ‘I didn’t think the ship would be so big,’ she said.
    ‘It isn’t very big.’
    ‘It is to me. I’ve never been on anything bigger than a ferry-boat before, remember.’
    He took out a cigarette and