Mrs Cornelius grinned. ‘I never ‘ad no bloody sense o’ tranquillity from wind,’ she said and burst into laughter shared by all except myself and the captain. Later she would explain the pun to me. Then, however, she had succeeded in her object and destroyed the over-serious tone of the conversation. After pudding, most passengers left the saloon; when Captain Monier-Williams with one or two others went to attend to their normal duties Mrs Cornelius performed some of her turns. Her career had begun in the Stepney music-halls and she had a large popular repertoire. The sailors were visibly cheered by what were evidently familiar favourites although the songs were mostly new to me. Eventually I learned them all and on more than one occasion would escape trouble, proving myself British with a rendering of Lily of Laguna or At Trinity Church I Met Me Doom.
In the course of that particular evening Mrs Cornelius grew rather tipsy. Eventually I had to help her back to our cabin. She was always a slave to a weak stomach and the laughter, the singing, the movement of the sea caused her to lose control before we got to our door. I helped her to the side. After a while she murmured she was much better and was ready to continue. I, too, could not have been entirely sober, for once inside, in the dark, while she sang The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery I attempted to climb into her bunk. She broke off long enough to remind me sharply that we were both ‘on our honour’. Ashamed of myself, I reluctantly ascended to my own berth.
When I woke the next morning there was pale light coming through the porthole. Mrs Cornelius, still in her pink and black silk dress, was sound asleep. Rather than disturb her (and somewhat unwilling to face her after coming so close to betraying her trust) I washed in our basin and went up on deck. This was to become my habit, partly because I was sleeping so badly below, partly because my lust intensified in the early hours of the morning and it was more than I could bear to lie above her while I desperately sought to maintain self-control. At dawn there were few people about. I could enjoy a solitary stroll and a smoke for an hour or two before breakfast. The only other passenger I encountered regularly was a thin, middle-aged woman never without very thick make-up, her face an arsenical green, her lips and hair bright scarlet. She would sit at a little deck-table playing Patience. The wind frequently disturbed her cards and sometimes blew them overboard, yet, apparently careless of this, she always continued with her game. I began to imagine her a creature from legend, an oracle, a captured Trojan seeress. There was certainly something of the gypsy about her black shawl decorated with large crimson roses, her vivid emerald dress and the red gloves to her elbows. Every morning, precisely at the same time, she took up her position. Concentrating on her cards, she never acknowledged my presence. Her husband, a crop-headed ex-soldier in a kind of civilian uniform of frock-coat and riding-trousers tucked into hunting-boots, would present himself to her the moment the first bell rang for breakfast; then she would gather up the cards, place them in a silver reticule, slip her long arm into his and go below. Although they never spoke they possessed a language of gesture and expression which suggested they were perpetually involved in the most intense intercourse.
During the first days of the voyage the ship’s main deck was almost constantly flooded. Cold, grey water merged imperceptibly with the sky and sometimes it seemed we were consigned to Limbo; we might have sailed over the edge of the world, destined never to make landfall again. Sitting in the restaurant, which between meals substituted as our main saloon, I would watch the rise and fall of the waves outside. Mrs Cornelius usually joined me at about two or three when she had completed her toilet. We would order a drink and chat casually with the other passengers. They were not, as she said, much of a bunch; but she was tolerant where I found most of them impossible. Those who stood out somewhat from the merchants and their wives were two little neuraesthenic sisters, forever holding hands, whom I mistook at first for lesbian lovers. A portly grain-dealer from Alexandrovsk told Mrs Cornelius he had helped the Tsar escape to Roumania in early 1918. He was friendly with Monsieur Riminski, the ex-owner of Odessa’s largest kinema, who liked to speak of his acquaintance with famous actors and plainly considered himself something of a film star. The signs of age on his handsome features were discreetly disguised with rouge and kohl. He planned, he informed us, to begin a new film studio in America and begged Mrs C. to become one of his first actresses. She giggled and said she would ‘fink abart it’. Riminski introduced us to his closest companion on board, a most unlikely choice, the tall Moldavian Prince Stanislav, pink and delicate and spindle-legged, like a flamingo. The Prince’s scatterbrained wife and their black-eyed twin sons smelled of eucalyptus and camphor and I avoided them, guessing them to be suffering from disease. Other saloon regulars included a swarthy, thick-set Georgian coal-merchant with a dark, forked beard and nothing to wear, apparently, but the same suit of evening tails and wolfskin cloak, both of which grew steadily mustier by the day. A Mennonite farmer, his underfed, shivering wife and five daughters, all in grey, were the only people prepared to speak to a pale, pudgy young man in ill-fitting clothes of the sort a bumpkin buys for his first visit to the city (everyone suspected he was a Skoptsy, nick-naming him ‘the eunuch’ behind his back). Lastly a Major Volisharof, whose white Don Cossack uniform was similar to the one I had packed away in my trunk, told us he was accompanying his little son and daughter to Yalta where they would be joined by their aunt. In Yalta, too, he hoped to find his regiment. His wife had been killed by the Reds. Volisharof was full of his children, forever pointing out their virtues and their vices, their physical characteristics, frequently in their presence. ‘Quick as a rat,’ he said one evening, gesturing with his vodka glass to where his lad and daughter played in a corner of the saloon. ‘Quick as a rat. But the girl’s a mouse.’ The chief feature of his nondescript military face was a moustache waxed in the German manner; clearly it rivalled his children for his attention. We talked about the Civil War. When he learned I had been fighting Reds around Kiev he remarked of campaigning difficulties in the Crimea. He was not leaving Russia, he declared, until either he or Trotski was dead. He had originally planned to disembark at Sebastopol but it had become impossible to know from day to day which side would control the city when we arrived. ‘We can only hope,’ he said.