Joy felt rather silly as Queen Elizabeth, unsure whether it was the presumptuousness of the choice, or the childishness of her outfit that was making her more uncomfortable. But when they finally arrived in the dining hall, and Joy caught sight of some of the other outfits, her mood began to lighten.
Pieter had dressed as an Egyptian trader, his body exposed from the waist up and blacked up with what could have been boot polish so that his muscles glowed and rippled in the dimmed lights. His blond hair was covered with a woolly black cap, crocheted by the elderly Mrs. Tennant, and he carried a basket of beads and wooden carvings. Thoroughly overexcited already, every now and then he would launch himself at one of the women, who would squeal theatrically, and wave him away, laughing and yet looking faintly cross. He never launched himself at Joy.
"Have I gone blotchy?" said Mrs. Fairweather, approaching her as she sat down at the table. "I'm sure the spray has given me spots."
Joy studied her tea-stained complexion.
"It looks fine to me," she said. "But I'll touch it up if you like. I'm sure one of the waiters will do us some cold tea."
Mrs. Fairweather pulled her compact from her handbag and studied her reflection, straightening the jewels in her headdress. "Oh, I'm sure I don't want to bother them. They'll all be terribly busy tonight. It's a special supper, I'm told."
"Hello, Joy. Or should I say Your Majesty?" It was Louis, who bowed low before her and then took her hand and kissed it, making Joy blush. "I must say, you look like you were born to it. Doesn't she, Mrs. Fairweather?" He was wearing a scruffy tweed skirt and a headscarf, as well as a rather alarming shade of lipstick.
"Oh, definitely," said Mrs. Fairweather. "Positively regal, she looks."
"Oh, please don't," said Joy, laughing, as Louis sat down beside her. "I shall get ideas above my station. May I ask what on earth you have come as?"
"Can't you tell?" Louis looked downcast. "I can't believe you can't tell."
Joy looked at Mrs. Fairweather and back again.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"I'm a land girl." he said, holding up a pitchfork. "Look! I bet you can't believe I got ahold of this!"
"A land girl?"
Mrs. Fairweather began to laugh. "Now I see it," she said. "Can you see it, Philip? Mr. Baxter's come as a land girl. Look, he's even got a bag of potatoes."
"What's a land girl?" said Joy, tentatively.
"Where have you been? Timbuktu?"
Joy looked around her, to see if anyone else shared her lack of knowledge. But Stella was squealing at Pieter, and Georgina Lipscombe was talking to the First Officer, and the only other bystander, a ballet dancer with suspiciously hairy legs, didn't appear to be listening.
"When did you last come to England?" said Louis.
"Oh, Gosh. When I was a child, I think," said Joy. "When Hong Kong was invaded, we were all sent to stay in Australia."
"Fancy that, Philip. Joy didn't know what a land girl was." Mrs. Fairweather nudged her husband, who, from under his turban, was gazing benignly at his gin and tonic.
"Fancy," he said, mildly.
"Did you really never see one?"
Joy began to feel rather awkward. There was always something in gatherings like these, she observed, to make her feel ignorant, or stupid. That was why she loved Edward. He never made her feel that way.
"I don't suppose there was any reason why Joy should know what a land girl was," said Louis, briskly. "I'm sure there are loads of things about Hong Kong that I should never understand. Can I get you a drink, Joy? Mrs. Fairweather?"
Joy smiled at him, grateful for his solicitousness. And the moment passed.
The swell gradually built up as they finished their main courses, so that the waiters had to occasionally clutch at passing bits of furniture to avoid dropping the plates, and the wine in Joy's glass began to tip at alarmingly violent angles.
"It's always like this," said Louis, who was seated next to her. His lipstick had rubbed off with his meal, so that she could now look at him without giggling. "First time I came across, I slid right off my bunk in my sleep."
Joy didn't mind. Every huge wave brought her closer to Tilbury. But some of the ladies began to exclaim disapprovingly, as if there should be someone to blame for this meteorological lack of consideration. Their voices rose shrilly, like those of the gulls, above the music, which the captain had ordered to continue, even though as the musicians kept having to steady themselves, it became increasingly disjointed. It was at this point that Stella, making her way unsteadily toward the rest rooms, had almost fallen over, and Pieter had leaped up to help her, sending his chair crashing backward. Joy saw Stella's expression as she thanked him and felt suddenly deeply uneasy.
Louis, watching her, refilled her wineglass, and told her to drink up. "If you drink enough you'll think it's just you swaying, instead of the ship," he said, and his hand accidentally touched hers. Joy, still staring at Stella as she held Pieter's supporting arm just a little too long, had almost not noticed that.
So she had drunk. She had been relatively abstemious up until tonight, but now, like the others, had been infected by a sense of something ending, a recklessness brought on by their isolation, and the thought of the more sober life, a more adult existence ahead. The toasts became louder, and more ridiculous: to the late King; to the old country; to Elizabeth, at which she found herself standing and nodding regally; to the Lone Ranger and Tonto; to the pudding, an elaborate confection of cream, sponge, and alcohol; and to the S.S. Destiny itself, as she lurched and swayed her way through the waves.
Joy found herself giggling, and not minding so much when Louis put his arm around her, and stopping noticing quite so much who had disappeared from the table and when. And when the Captain had climbed onto the podium and announced that he was about to award the prize for the best outfit, Joy had rather rudely heckled him as mercilessly as the rest of her table.
"Shhh! Shhh! Ladies and gentlemen!" the First Officer had insisted, tapping his brandy glass with the edge of his knife. "Quiet! Please!"
"You know, Joy, I do think you're absolutely wonderful."
Joy tore her gaze away from the podium and stared at Louis, whose brown eyes had suddenly taken on the liquid longing of a puppy dog.
"I've been wanting to tell you since Bombay." He placed his hand over hers, and Joy quickly withdrew it, fearful that someone might see.
"Now, ladies and gentlemen, steady, please. C'mon, c'mon." The captain held his hands, palm down, before him, and then threw one up sharply as the ship lurched suddenly to starboard, so that the passengers whooped and catcalled.
"It's an awful long time to be separated from the one you love, Joy. I know that. I've got a girl at home, too. But it doesn't stop you wanting someone else, does it?"
Joy gazed at him, feeling suddenly saddened by the fact that he had had to complicate everything. She liked him. In other circumstances--well, perhaps. But not this . . . Joy shook her head, trying to instill a little sense of regret into that small motion, just to save his feelings.
"Let's not talk like this, Louis."
Louis gazed at her for slightly too long, and then looked down at the table.
"Sorry," he said. "Probably had a bit too much to drink."
"Shhh!" said Mrs. Fairweather. "Will you two be quiet! He's trying to speak!"
"Now, I know this is the moment you've all been waiting for, and I'd like to say you've all made a tremendous effort . . . but that wouldn't be true." The captain paused, to the sound of laughter.
"No, no. I'm just joshing. Now, I've deliberated long and hard over these costumes. And over some I've deliberated as long as possible." Here he looked meaningfully at Stella's diaphanous veils. Joy, preoccupied as she was, found herself relieved by the fact that Stella was still at the table. Pieter had been absent for some time. "But the overwhelming decision of myself and my colleagues, has been to award our prize"--he held up a bottle of champagne--"to a man who has proven he is capable of ba
refaced cheek. Literally."
The assembled passengers paused, briefly silenced.
"Ladies and gentlemen, Pieter Brandt. Or, should I say, our Egyptian trader!"
The dining hall burst into applause, with napkins and half-eaten bread rolls thrown high into the air. Joy, along with the rest of her table, glanced around, trying to locate Pieter among the many elaborately disguised heads. As his woolly black wig failed to reveal itself, the clapping slowly filtered out and a small murmur began to swell, as passengers' heads swiveled around.
Joy looked up at the Captain, who had been briefly silenced by Pieter's nonappearance, and then at Stella, who looked equally nonplussed.
"Perhaps he's off trading," the Captain joked. "I'd better get the cook to go and check on our stores." He stood, and gazed around him, evidently wondering what to do next.
He was interrupted by a sudden whisper at the other end of the dining room. It spread down the line of tables like a soft wind, so that Joy, following its direction, eventually caught sight of its object. All eyes landed on Georgina Lipscombe, who walked unsteadily through the doors at the end, her hair now loosened from the peaked cap, and hanging in loose curls around her shoulders. She staggered slightly, trying to catch her balance, and reached out to hold the back of an unoccupied chair.
Joy stared at her, trying to take in the significance of what she was seeing, and then looked over at Stella, who had gone quite gray.
For Georgina Lipscombe's immaculate naval whites were now less than pristine. From her epaulets down to somewhere around the middle of her thighs, Mrs. Lipscombe's uniform bore a smudged, but definite imprint of boot polish.
Georgina, apparently oblivious, stared at the faces turned toward her, and then, her head lifted, evidently decided to ignore them. Reaching their table, she sat down, somewhat heavily, in her chair, and lit up a cigarette. There was a brief, loaded silence.
And then: "You absolute tart!" yelled Stella, and flew at her across the table, grabbing her hair, her epaulets, any bit of spare flesh or uniform she could reach before Louis and the First Officer could leap from their own seats to try to pull her off. Joy, stunned and frozen, simply stood, not recognizing this wild-eyed banshee as her friend, her veils tearing and ripping from her costume as she scrambled to get a better hold. "You bloody, bloody tart!" Stella shouted, crying now, her elaborate dancing-girl makeup already streaked around her eyes. Louis managed to grab her arm, forcing her to relinquish her grip on Georgina's hair, but it was some seconds before either man felt quite confident enough to let her go.
"Shhh, now dear," said Mrs. Fairweather, stroking her hair as the men sat her down again. "Come on. Calm down. There's quite enough excitement for one night."
The entire dining hall was silenced. The Captain motioned to the band to start playing again, but there was a long, pregnant pause before they tentatively rediscovered their place in the music. Around them, the other diners stared wide-eyed, laughing in shocked tones or shaking their heads in disapproval, as they slowly returned their attention to their own tables.
Georgina, her hair matted and bunched on one side where Stella had grabbed it, placed a hand to her face, checking for blood. Seeing no evidence of it on her fingers, she gazed around her on the tablecloth, looking for the lit cigarette that had been knocked out of her hand. It was floating, rather forlornly, in Mrs. Fairweather's drink. She calmly removed another from her silver cigarette case, and lit it. Then she lifted her head and gazed back at Stella.
There was a brief silence.
"You silly girl," she said, exhaling a long plume of smoke. "You didn't think you were the only one, did you?"
Joy sat outside on the starboard deck, her arms around the sobbing Stella, wondering how long it would be before she could gently point out the fact that not only were they both soaked, but also her teeth were beginning to chatter.
Stella had cried for more than twenty minutes now, apparently oblivious to the freezing sea spray, and the lurching deck, seemingly conscious only of her own misery as she huddled into Joy's damp and mournful embrace.
"I can't believe he lied to me," she gasped, during a brief interlude from sobbing. "All those things he said . . ."
Joy chose not to dwell on what they might have been. Or what they might have led to.
"She's so awful as well. She's old, for God's sake." Stella gazed at Joy through eyes swollen with tears. Her voice was incredulous. "She's got a hard face, and she wears too much makeup. She's even got stretch marks."
It was not so much that Pieter had cheated on her, Joy was beginning to suspect. It was what Stella saw as his indiscriminate choice of partner.
"Oh, Joy . . . What am I going to do?"
Joy thought back to Pieter Brandt's return to the dining table. He had laughed and made a couple of off-color jokes at first, his inebriation preventing him from picking up on the fact that the table had greeted him in stony silence. Then his laughter had become rather forced, and he had told another funny anecdote, as if trying to restore the mood. But when the Captain came and plonked the bottle of champagne in front of him, curtly announcing "You're the winner" before walking off again, Pieter had apparently, finally, twigged the fact that all was not as it had been when he disappeared some half an hour previously.
"You might need to touch up your boot polish, old boy," Louis had said, staring pointedly at Pieter's pale chest, and then equally pointedly at Georgina's stained frontage.
For obvious reasons it had been impossible to tell whether Pieter had actually gone white, but he had glanced anxiously around at his fellow travelers, and then briefly excused himself, saying that he needed to "stretch his legs." Georgina had looked bored, sucking on her ever-present cigarette and managing to stare into the distance while not actually meeting anyone else's eye. Eventually, apparently peeved by the lack of male attention, she had left the table after him.
But Stella had already gone by then, escorted to the rest room by Mrs. Fairweather, who had wiped vainly at her face with an ill-suited lace handkerchief and appealed to Stella to just stop crying. "You looked so pretty with your makeup," she wittered. "You don't want to let that woman see she's got you all upset." She had looked rather relieved when Joy came in, and had handed Stella over with a touch too much enthusiasm and gratitude. "You two are friends," she said. "You know how to cheer her up. You'll tell her." And then, in a cloud of Arpege, beads, and translucent fabric, she had disappeared.
"What am I going to do?" said Stella, a half hour later, staring out at the black and frothing sea. "Everything's finished. Maybe I should just . . ."
Joy followed Stella's gaze across the deck and tightened her grip on her friend's arm.
"Don't you dare talk like that," she said, suddenly panicked. "Don't you dare even think like that, Stella Hanniford."
Stella turned to face her, her expression suddenly free from all artifice and guile.
"But what am I going to do, Joy? I've ruined everything, haven't I?"
Joy took Stella's cold hands in her own.
"You've ruined nothing. You just got a little too close to a stupid, stupid man, who, after tomorrow, you will never, ever have to see again."
"But that's the awful thing, Joy. Part of me wants to see him again."
Stella looked back at her, her big blue eyes wide with misery. She relinquished one of Joy's hands, and pushed her hair back from her face.
"He was absolutely wonderful. Much better than Dick. And that's the worst thing--how can I go back to Dick and pretend that everything's okay when I've felt something so much more?"
Joy felt sick. Part of her wanted to block her ears, to say to Stella, "Stop! I don't want to know!" But she was conscious that she was Stella's only possible confidante. The only confidante of someone who, while always a little on the dramatic side, had gazed out at those waves in a frankly unnerving manner.
"You've got to forget him," she said eventually. Uselessly. "You've got to make it work with Dick."
"But
what if I shouldn't have married Dick in the first place? Oh, I was in love with him, I'll grant you. But what on earth did I know? I'd only kissed two men before I met him. How did I know I'd end up liking someone else better?"
"Dick's a good man," said Joy, thinking of the handsome, affable pilot. "You were so happy together. You can be again."
Stella began to cry again. "But I don't feel like it. I don't want to have to smile at him, and kiss him, and let him press his horrid old body against me. I wanted Pieter . . . and now I'm going to be stuck with someone I don't love anymore for the rest of my life."
Joy placed her arms around her friend again, and gazed at the dark sky. There were hardly any stars tonight, the constellations being obscured by the low, mucky clouds.
"It will all be all right," she murmured, into Stella's cold ear. "I promise. It will all look better in the morning."
"How do you know?" said Stella, lifting her head again.
"Because things always are. I always feel better in the daylight."
"No, not that. How do you know that you've made the right choice?"
Joy thought for a minute, not wanting to give the wrong answer. She thought, briefly, of Louis.
"I suppose you don't," she said, eventually. "You just have to hope."