I pictured him climbing a path through the trees with my torn underwear tucked under his arm. He’d said he was going to get it washed and mended. Something in the way he’d spoken suggested servants, not a wife. I asked myself what kind of Englishman would be singing in Latin while walking his dog. Could he be a priest? If he was, he would probably try to make me go back. And that was something I had already decided I couldn’t do.
I must have fallen asleep while I waited for him to return. I dreamed that I was on board a ship. Not the Brabantia, but the liner that had taken me out to Africa in ’34. In the dream it was our first night out of port, and I was dancing. It was an odd thing to dream about because for me that floating ballroom was out-of-bounds. We had to be in our cabin by eight thirty, with lights-out at nine. My roommate would always be snoring gently a few minutes later. But not me. The life of the ship was just starting at that time of the evening. I would catch drifts of music: the notes of melodies I remembered from my teens. It brought back the faces of boys who had waltzed me round the dance halls of Dublin. Boys whose lips had hovered dangerously close to mine, smelling of cigarettes and ginger ale.
From the age of eighteen I had been kept away from all this. For three years I’d lived behind high walls, deprived of all the pleasures I’d taken for granted as a girl. But on board the ship the world I had left behind was there—just yards away. I was permitted to walk around the decks during daylight hours, but not to join in the games of tennis and quoits the other passengers were enjoying. I could go to the library for the service of worship that was held there, but I couldn’t take any of the books from the shelves. I remember stopping in front of a billboard advertising films that were being shown on the voyage. I’d stared at the faces of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, longing to see Saratoga. It had been easier when I was shut in not to miss such things.
Lying awake in my cabin I would hear the clink of ice as waiters pushed buckets of champagne along the corridor; waves of laughter as the doors to the saloon opened and closed; and later, when the band had stopped playing, I saw shadowy profiles outside my window—lovers kissing in the dark.
One night, when sleep refused to come, I crept out of the cabin sometime after midnight with a shawl draped over my head and shoulders. Even though it was dark, I was afraid of being recognized. On my daytime walks I had sometimes caught male passengers following me with their eyes. It seemed that for some men, a woman like me presented a peculiar attraction. A special challenge. To be seen prowling the decks in the early hours of the morning would, I feared, encourage that sort of man.
I’d settled myself into a deck chair, gazing at a vast starlit sky, watching a banana moon slip out of the waves. I must have fallen into a sort of trance as I imagined myself suspended between its yellow horns as if I were lying in a hammock. As it climbed higher, I was looking down at the houses of the people on the coasts bordering the sea. But they were dream houses and had no roofs. I could see couples side by side in bed, children cuddling toys as they slept. It had felt like a glimpse of the life I could have had.
The sound of something rattling overhead brought me out of that deep sleep—that dream of a dream. I sat up, startled, wondering where on earth I was. My brain took a while to make sense of the shadowy shapes of the boathouse, to work out that the noise I could hear was a gull hopping about on the roof.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that on my first day of freedom—in this place whose name I didn’t yet know—I’d dreamed about dancing and marriage and children. For all the years of trying, I’d never really managed to bury the yearnings that had surfaced on that voyage to Africa. Nine years on, I was as far from suppressing that side of my nature as I’d been at twenty-one. Further, perhaps—because heading back to Europe on the Brabantia, I had prayed for a way out. And three days later the ship had been hit.
All those people.
Your fault. You willed it.
Better if you had died, too.
The damning voice inside my head was silenced by the creak of the door opening.
“I’ve brought the first aid kit you asked for. And something for you to wear.”
His voice was muffled by the pile of things he was carrying in his arms. I could see only the top half of his face. There was no sound of Brock, the dog. He must have left him at home—wherever that was.
“There’s bread and some eggs, too. Sorry I can’t offer you bacon—our pigs are feeding half the county these days.”
A farmer, then, I thought, not a priest. I wondered if I had imagined that otherworldly singing.