The life of the hotel swirled up round me; people were up and down the corridors, in and out the lift; doors banged, bath water ran, there was the ring of telephones and laughter in the rooms as people dressed. In the dining room Indian waiters were in and out, up and down; I saw myself, in the mirror walls, looking at the Buddhalike headwaiter, red-sashed and watching above folded arms. People drank coffee afterward in the lounge and on the wide veranda. A ricksha boy came whooping past among the stream of cars, joggling two small boys and waving his feathered head, like the tail of a peacock put on in the wrong place, “… see one once in a blue moon. And I believe the municipality isn’t issuing any new licenses to them, so they’ll all be gone soon,” someone at the next table was saying disgustedly.
“Yes, it’s true, they give you the idea that that’s the normal form of transport in Durban. It just shows you how much you can believe about the travel posters you see of other countries. Come to beautiful Austria …”
“… kills them before they’re forty. The strain on the heart.”
And on the other side a family argument was going on between a young girl and her mother. “You know what those beach things are like. And this is a wonderful film, really, Mummy. I don’t want to hear the same old man singing that thing about Ireland. Or wherever it was, — They do, they do, they always have him.”
“He had a trial gallop on the beach this morning. …”
“All right, tomorrow then. But you must get the desk to ring you before seven. …”
They ebbed out, into the town and the cinema and the night clubs. They trailed upstairs and trailed down again with wraps, ready to drive out to roadhouses. I went to my room early, looking out at the bobbing lights on the harbor for a moment before I got into the big, soft, anonymous hotel bed. And the next morning I watched them go, all the holiday-makers, down to the beach after breakfast, with a kind of indulgence. A young man who had spoken to me in the lift appeared in a shirt patterned with hula girls. “See you …,” he said, waving a towel toward the beach, and I smiled and shook my head. He was so careless of the response he elicited (there were hundreds of girls and no doubt he signaled to them all that he would meet them on the beach) that he mistook my meaning and waved back enthusiastically.
Just before lunch, I saw my ship come in. An old gentleman stretched, yawned, put his paper down. “That must be the Pretoria Castle” he said to his wife.
“What?”
He pointed to the horizon. “There. That grayish white thing. I just saw in the paper that she’s due in this morning.”
“I haven’t got my glasses,” said his wife.
Although I wasn’t going aboard until Monday, I decided that I must go down to the docks after lunch to have a look at the ship. In any case, it was as good a way as any of passing away the afternoon. I always had loved wandering about the docks, even as a child, and now that I myself actually was going to sail away in one of the ships, I felt I should find a whiff of the promise of the places I was going to, as well as the fascination of those I probably should never see. I found myself dressing up for this ship; I cleaned my white shoes and put on a frock that suited me particularly well, and a big linen hat. I even opened one of my suitcases and took out a pair of new gloves (farewell present from Laurie).
I picked my way among the trucks and the coils of greasy rope to the wharf where a harbor policeman had told me she was berthed. And quite a long way before I reached her I could see her, a big gray wall of a ship, parked as solidly as a building. Smaller ships on either side looked too small for people to live in, by comparison. Or alternatively, she looked too big to float. The companionway was down, opening surprisingly into her towering gray side and showing, inside this flap of ship, a wide stairway and a great bank of flowers before a mirrored wall. But I was not allowed to go up; an official-looking man in white explained that this was the period, directly after the disembarkation of passengers, when they “gave her a spring clean, and so on.” He grinned in a matey fashion, and I could not resist telling him — someone — that I should be a passenger myself, in a day or two. “Then you’ll have plenty of time to see her,” he said, smiling indulgently. “But you can pop along tomorrow if you like. She’ll be all open then.”
I stood a moment, following the sweep of her, up, up. The huge anchor, hooked with vanity, like an ornament, on her side. Runnels of rust streaming down from it over the pale paint, like seaweed she had forgotten to flick off. Down between the edge of the dock on which I stood and the lower limits of the bulk of her, a foot or two of dirty water slapped, afloat with matchsticks and the shapeless, ugly humps of dead jellyfish, like the torn-out eyeballs of sea monsters. I wandered along, looking up at docks of ships on which men were at work, or sailors, with the disheveled, careless air of women discovered in curlers and slippers, hung over the rails in vest and pants, talking lazily to someone below and flicking cigarette butts into the domesticated water. I wished, now, I had asked what the name of Joel’s ship was, and where he was staying until he embarked. Yet somehow I felt Isa wouldn’t have known that, anyway. But it should be easy enough to find out about the ship, from the Lloyd-Triestino people. That was the Italian line, and there were only two ships, as far as I knew, on the route. Joel … It would be odd to see him again, here. I was not sure whether I wanted to; actually the whole idea seemed so improbable that I felt indifferent. At this point I stepped aside to avoid some sort of unpleasant-looking mess that had been spilled on the dock, and almost bumped into a man in a vaguely nautical outfit — tight serge pants and a polo-necked cotton jersey. We dodged back and forth before each other for a moment, and then he stopped, smiled, and gestured me past. We both mumbled, “Sorry!” and on impulse I said: “I wonder — d’you know if there’s an Italian ship in now?” “You’ve just passed her. The Ostia. She’s over there, beside the Pretoria Castle.” He pointed back over my shoulder. I turned to look again at the squat white hen of a ship almost under the prow of the huge mail ship. So that was it. I walked back and had a look: Ostia—I had read the name when I passed before, but it had seemed to me vaguely Scandinavian; I did not connect it with Italy.
The smallness of the ship beside the Pretoria Castle fascinated me. A dumpy little thing, riddled with portholes and hung about with rickety-looking decks. Joel in this, I in the immense creature next door. The hen and the elephant. It seemed perfectly ridiculous; I saw us, firmly fixed, in Atherton, walking along under the pines in front of the Mine Recreation Hall.
The companionway was down, here, too. There was no one to stop me at the foot, so I went up, swaying slowly on my too-high heels. A uniformed man at the top watched me with a considering air, as if I were being given an audition for something. “May I come up?” I asked, already there. He looked at me broodingly. His eyes were so heavily liquid dark that he seemed to have difficulty in shifting the focus of his gaze. He shook his head. “Unless you know someone passenger. You must go to the office, get a card for permission.” I was annoyed that he had let me climb up for nothing. “You mean from Lloyd-Triestino? But where is the office?” He told me the name of the street. “Look,” I said, as if I had not understood properly, “but I do know someone—” There was a chance that Joel’s name might be on the passenger list, even if he was not yet aboard, and if it was not, then I should know that either he had sailed already, or was going on a later ship. In any case, I might as well take a chance: I was curious to look over this fat little Ostia.