There is no reason why it should be otherwise, Laura told herself. But shivered.
‘Belle,’ she called, in a white voice, as low as she could make it above the noise, ‘let us go now. Everything has been said.’
Soon the party was riding away, and Voss looked after them, and realized that he had not spoken to Laura Trevelyan. He watched the coil of hair in the nape of her neck, which revealed nothing, and her shoulders which suggested none of the strength she had displayed on that strange evening in the garden.
He stood there wetting his lips in the crowd, as if he were about to call some last remark; but what? And, of course, his words would not have blown so far. Still, when Frank Le Mesurier fetched him to settle some matter that had to be decided, the lines of his face did appear somewhat relaxed.
‘Can you not sometimes make a decision in my absence, Frank?’ he asked.
‘What is this, sir?’ exclaimed the amazed Le Mesurier. ‘When would my decisions have been accepted?’
But Voss only laughed.
All that forenoon the crowd loitered, waiting for the wind. Some were swearing at the dust, some had got drunk, and were in danger of being taken up. One individual in particular was falling-drunk. His hat — that was gone; but on no account would he be parted from a little keg, which he carried like a baby in his arms.
He would be ashamed in the morning, one honest body remarked.
‘It is me own business,’ he heard enough to reply, ‘and this is the last time, so let me alone.’
‘It is always the last time with the likes of you,’ the lady said. ‘I know from experience and a husband. Who is dead of it, poor soul.’
‘I will not be dead of this,’ drooled the man. ‘Or if I am, it is a lovely way to die.’
The lady, morbidly attached to a situation over which she had no control, was sucking such teeth as remained to her.
‘It is a scandal,’ she said, of that which she could not leave be.
‘Why, if it is not Mr Turner,’ interrupted Harry Robarts, who had come up.
‘Who is that accusin’ me now?’ complained the man. ‘Oh, it is you, boy,’ he said more quietly.
‘We had all forgot you, Mr Turner, an’ if the wind had rose, you would have had no part in the expedition; the ship would have sailed.’
‘It is not my fate,’ said Turner. ‘The wind is with me. Or against, is it?’
Either way, he blew out such a quantity from his own body, that the lady who had been solicitous for him, removed herself at speed.
‘Come now, Mr Turner,’ said the boy, ‘you are not acting as you ought. Come on board quiet like, with me, an’ lay down for a bit. Then you will feel better.’
‘I do not feel bad,’ insisted Turner.
But he came as best he could, with his little keg, and fell down a hatchway without breaking his neck, and lay there.
Once, only, as the ship began to move later that afternoon, he rose up in a dream, and cried:
‘Mr Voss, you are killing us! Give me the knife, please. Ahhhhh! The butter! The butter! It is not my turn to die.’
So he was saved up out of his dreams, and preserved for the future.
*
The future? Laura Trevelyan could not bear to think of it, even though the present, through which the riding party moved, was still to some extent an unpleasant dream. They were riding home, however. Tea trees were scratching them, a stink of stale fish was rising out of Woolloomoolloo, and an Irish person, wife of the boatswain, it transpired, ran out of a humpy to ask whether they did not have news of Osprey. The boatswain’s wife, with a baby clawing at her bodice, and several little boys at heel, had every belief in that life.
After escorting them as far as Potts Point, Mr Radclyffe left the young ladies to change their habits for loose gowns and a kind of informal, private beauty, that admirably suited the spring afternoon in which they finished a luncheon of cold meat and bread and honey. But the dream persisted disturbingly. Laura Trevelyan, drawing back her lips to bite the slice of bread and honey, saw whole rows of sailors’ blackened teeth gaping from a gunnel. The knife with which she slashed the butter, had a mottled, slippery handle, and could have been made from horse’s hoof.
Afterwards the two cousins went up to Laura’s room.
‘I am going to rest,’ the latter announced.
‘So will I,’ said Belle. ‘I will lie here with you.’
Which she had never done before.
So the two girls lay down, in some way grateful for each other, even in uneasy sleep, which was half present, half future, almost wholly apprehensive. Even Belle, touching her own hot cheek, was conscious of the future, not as the gauze that it had always been in the past, but as some inexorable marble thing. It was forming.
Tom, she was saying, men fall in love, over and over again, but it is always with themselves.
Do you really think to escape? he asked. You will not, even though I may sometimes wish it. It is Laura who will escape, by putting on canvas. She has sailed.
Belle Bonner sat up.
‘She has sailed.’
But it was Rose Portion speaking.
‘What?’ asked Belle, whose face was in an afternoon fever.
‘Oh, miss, the ship. Osprey,’ said Rose, who had come in a hurry, with a dish of preserved cumquats in her hand.
Laura still lay in long folds of uneasy marble. Her hand was curled, and could have been carved, if it had not been for a twitching.
‘Miss? Miss Laura!’ called Rose. ‘It is the ship. It is such a sight.’
Belle touched her cousin.
The two women who were awake realized that the event was somehow of greater concern to the third who was still asleep.
Laura Trevelyan woke then, raised herself upon straight arms, got up, and went out without word or second thought to the long balcony. Her skirt, which was of a pale colour and infinite afternoon coolness, streamed behind her.
There, indeed, was the ship.
The wind was moving Osprey out towards the Heads. The blue water, now ruffled up, was full of little white waves. It had become an animal of evident furriness, but still only playful, because the mood was a recent one. Osprey continued in her pride of superior strength. She was not yet shaken.
‘Yes, they have got away,’ said Laura, in a clear, glad, flat voice.
Her face also was rather flat for that moment, just as its expression of gladness, which she had flung on while rising from her sleep, was inadequate and transparent; it did not quite conceal.
‘Oh, I will pray for them,’ exclaimed Rose Portion, clutching the saucer with the cumquats.
‘But you do not know them,’ said Belle, to whom her maid’s concern was consequently absurd.
‘I do not need to know them.’
‘They may not need praying for. It is ridiculous.’
Rose did not answer.
The three women watched the ship.
Laura Trevelyan threw back the sleeve of her creamy gown, as if it had been heavy.
‘Do you think Mr Palfreyman is nice?’ Belle Bonner asked.
‘From what little I have seen of him, I think exceptionally nice,’ her cousin replied.
‘But quiet.’
‘He says whatever has to be said.’
The women were watching the ship.
‘He is a man of education, I expect,’ said Belle. ‘Not an ignorant colonial savage. Like us.’
‘Oh, miss!’ protested Rose.
‘But he is kind,’ Belle continued. ‘And kind people do not mind.’
‘Oh, Belle, do not chatter so!’ said Laura.
‘But is it not true?’
‘All that you have said. Though beside the point.’
The three women watched the ship.
Presently Rose Portion, who had taken upon herself that chastening which was intended for Miss Belle, said in a whisper, holding her stomach: