The Blue Book (2 page)

Later, more than thirty years later, a man and a woman wait to board a boat – a liner, to be more accurate. They stand in a nicely murmuring and generally well-dressed queue while suffering a sense of gentle disappointment. They had expected and, only half jokingly, discussed the quayside bustle in which they would want to be immersed before embarkation: stevedores hefting cabin trunks through the clean tang of seaside air, other couples walking up brisk wooden gangplanks in handmade shoes and waving.

The woman has hair like her father's: a thick black with illogical spasms of curl. She would rather this were not the case. She has also inherited what is pretty much her mother's figure, so at school she was mildly dumpy and, having spent her twenties and thirties getting away with being more curved than actually fat, she imagines that her forties and a slowing metabolism will force her into increasingly vague knitwear and mail order slacks with elasticated waistbands. She does not anticipate that she'll enjoy this, although in some ways she'd have to admit that she's had a good run. Her full name is Elizabeth Caroline Barber and she is thinking –
I could just fancy a bit of waving. I have no idea who we'd be waving to, though. Or to whom we would be waving. There's something about queuing for a liner that makes you want to get your grammar right . . . No one ashore we
could
wave to. Except the stevedores – and I wouldn't be sure about waving to them – all greasy caps and Mickey-Finned drinks with Humphrey Bogart, your stevedores.

I think.

But not really a job that exists any more, is it? Or it does exist, but not in Britain, because we don't have docks, not really. Shore porters – do we still have them? Do we still have real jobs here at all? Ones you need to train for, that have titles, special hats? Jesus, the postman had a uniform when I was a kid – now he looks like the man who mugged the man in the uniform and stole his sack. Not that he has a sack any more either.

The jolly postmen's Christmas race with loaded sacks – they used to show a bit of that on telly every year – the light-hearted end to the news. Or did I make that up? I'm fairly sure it used to happen. A manifestation of postal pride – vaguely servile and sweaty, but pride, nonetheless . . .

Is this the way I'll be now? I'll climb aboard, get more and more nostalgic, then judgemental, then terrified of change and eventually I'm going to be right wing? Just happily fixated on the noose and the birch, detention centres for foreign miscreants, sterilisations for the poor and/or thick?

It's because I'm annoyed.

Being annoyed is almost indistinguishable from being right wing.

Correction: being annoyed
in a queue
is almost indistinguishable
from being right wing. That kind of unpleasantly bottled fury and tedium isn't going to break out in celebrations of your brotherhood with one and all and the commonality of human experience – not when one and all are in your way and your own experience is uniquely pissed off with every other human on earth.

If State Socialism had been more sensible, it wouldn't have generated all those queues – that's what cut its throat in the long run – everyone a bloody fascist before they got their four-ounce loaf of bread. I would imagine.

Naturally, I'm thinking of State Socialism because that will make me even less comfortable when I'm already, as I might say, exquisitely aware that only contemplating – from a distance – the outside of this luxury bloody liner has made me feel slightly filthy, a bit
wrong
.

Behind us, the country is being cut up and auctioned off for meat and we couldn't care, apparently – we're just sailing away.

Guilty, that's what this makes me. I'm starting to feel sticky with it.

Probably not starting – could have been building for a while.

Has been building.

I want to wash. Lie down and wash and then lie down again. And then wash.

And, of course, I am undemocratically irritated by the utter lack of luxury at this stage in the proceedings – cheap carpet, prefab walls, grey-sounding
announcements relating to technical/nautical difficulties and delays – which may or may not be alarming: I understand none of them – and a rank of vaguely shoddy check-in desks, behind which women in uniforms do almost nothing very slowly.

Why are we
here
? We're not
cruise people
. We're
not quoits and gin slings and rubbers of bridge people
. Or
being driven past monuments at speed with optional commentary people
, we are not
tonight will be the 1974 theme disco in the Galaxy Room people
. We will not be getting tattoos while in altered states, or buying Moroccan boys, or toppling wealthy aunts over the side, and we will not be – hopefully – dying in an unfortunate but historic mid-Atlantic calamity.

Why are we here?

Why am I here?

Why am I here with Derek?

Why is Derek here with me?

Why are we standing in a non-moving queue which, at best, threatens to funnel us into a holding area equipped with unadventurous vending machines and a lady who seems to be selling tea and shockingly rudimentary sandwiches. She may also have biscuits, I can't tell from here.

At least there are toilets.

Currently out of reach, but it's good to know they've been provided.

Over there.

Where we can't use them.

Not that I couldn't nip away and ease discomfort should I need to, although Derek might not like that – my leaving him.

He's in a mood.

Hasn't said so, doesn't need to, doesn't speak during moods. Self-explanatory, his bad temper, by dint of its heaving great silence.

Nevertheless, without using the medium of language he is still making it plain that he doesn't want to be surrounded by the staggeringly ancient as they whine about their pills and their luggage and their feet, or – should they, by some miracle, have actually been processed – as they shuffle between the tea lady and the toilets while mouthing sandwiches and apparently coming close to coughing their last.

We are, by miles, the youngest couple here. We are also the tallest. Well, Derek is the tallest. Just about. No doubt, should he – like our queue-dwelling neighbours – live to be 180, his own vertebrae will have collapsed into powder and aches and he will be smaller, or else hooped over like that guy there who is practically, for goodness' sake, peering back at life through his own knees. Which must be novel. Then again, at his age, would he want to keep on having to look ahead?

In front of Elizabeth, Derek hunches and shrugs his shoulders inside his jacket, then rubs one hand into and through his hair.

Dirty blond.

And she remembers this morning and lying on her side, newly awake, still softly fitting back into herself and being bewildered by a thought, by the idea of
holding – she had this perfectly clear sensation of holding
her arms around warm, breathing ribs, a lean chest – her
hands meeting over his breathing – a dream of her resting
in tight to the curve of his spine. But she wasn't holding anyone.

Hypnopompic hallucination. It's not uncommon. Might be linked to stress.

I have stress.

My stresses are considerable.

A long spine, clearly enunciated, and then the dream had closed and made her miss him.

Silly.

More than silly – quite a lot more than that.

More than silly being currently the absolute best I can muster.

Derek had been out of bed and clattering about in the hotel shower, trotting to the sink, tooth brushing, spitting, throat-clearing, shaving, forgetting and then not forgetting to comb his hair. He had been readying himself while Beth was quietly left with a hot illusion, finding it deep, convincing.

Later, she'd held his hand in the taxi as they headed for the docks. She'd felt his knuckles, she'd suffered that tiny bump of nervousness as the pale side of the ship approached them, a higher and higher slab – like a building, like something too large to float.

Although it will. I have every confidence that it will. Massive boat for a massive ocean, that's not a problem.

And it's not as if we've had to pay for this – not exactly. This is a – what would you call it? – windfall. A possibly fortunate happenstance.

Then again – no such thing as a free cruise. Which isn't a popular saying, but could be – it might be appropriate . . .

Not that we're on a cruise, not honestly what we could say is a cruise. This will be
transport
– Southampton to New York – like catching a bus.

Well, not so much like a bus.

More like being taught to appreciate the romance of taking tea at four and cabin stewards and sunsets off the stern before an early night.

Sunsets off the bow. Heading west – it would be the bow. Where you'd be exposed, wind-lashed, freezing. Not romantic.

Just the early night then.

Like willingly falling unconscious in a vast disaster movie with a cast of the virtually dead.

Christ, I don't know why I'm doing this.

I just do not.

‘Boring, isn't it? Or else, perhaps not so much boring as
unsettling
. I mean,
I'm
unsettled . . . Can't speak for anyone else. Sorry . . .' This is the man who has ended up standing behind her in the line.

Behind him is the brittle lady with aggressive jewellery – the one Elizabeth has decided to think of as a quietly alcoholic widow, the one who genuinely does seem to be accompanied by what might once have been called A Companion.

Bet she'll turn out to be less quietly alcoholic.

Elizabeth is starting to gather hypotheses about many of her relatively-soon-to-be fellow passengers.

She has no theories about the man. He does not seem to be anything in particular. He has one hand in his trouser pocket and whatever bags he is travelling with must have been handed over for loading, because he is carrying nothing beyond a dark brown overcoat. It is a noticeably good coat, although he does not seem to care about it, keeps it haphazardly folded across one arm.

It'll crease.

And he'll be sorry if they lose his luggage.

No. No, he won't.

His suit, although vaguely ill-kempt, fits him suspiciously
well.

Made for him.

He would buy other luggage, if they lost his. There's nothing he couldn't replace.

That's what I'd guess.

Even though she knows this is unfair, she believes there is something despicable about a person who can't appreciate his own belongings, who doesn't need his clothes.

Should this happen to be the case. Judging the book by its cover – which one never should.

‘I do apologise. Perhaps you didn't want to talk.'

‘What?' She doesn't want to seem rude. Saying
what
to a stranger would be rude, in almost anyone's opinion. Ignoring someone when they speak to you and thinking about them instead is rude, too. ‘Um . . .' Doing it again would be ruder. ‘I'm sorry.' Whether you know them or not.

‘Ah. So we're both sorry.' He rummages violently in the pockets of his coat and then stops. He inclines his head and apparently gives his entire attention to the notch in her collarbone. He addresses it earnestly. ‘I . . . by myself, you see. Long voyage ahead . . . not incredibly long and there's the cinema, shows, entertainers . . . probably far
too much going on to deal with, in actuality,
uncomfortable
numbers
of possibilities – but familiar faces
. . .' He breaks off to gaze beyond her, as if he is searching for something troublesome and fast moving. He is pale
in a way that suggests fragility, illness. He sighs, ‘There are occasionally times –
will be
, I beg your pardon, occasionally times when one would like to chat – when
I
would. Apart from
this
time, of course, which is
excruciating
– but hardly a time at all, more a type of solid, liquid maybe, that
has to be got through
. Probably, though, you don't
want
to chat and so everything I've said is . . .
irrelevant
.' The man blinks, considers. ‘Or else . . . chatting might not be involving,
distracting
enough.' He shakes his head briefly and steps towards her, his left foot splaying very gently, not inelegant, but outwith his control. He walks as if his shoes are too stiff, or too heavy, or not his.

Or as if he's afraid. I would say he's afraid. He walks like a man on glass, on ice.

He falters to a halt. ‘Are you good at maths?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Maths.' He smiles past her, aims the expression quite carefully at her partner's doggedly mute back. ‘Arithmetic? Numbers? One and one equalling two. As an alternative to eleven. Or three. In the binary system, three – but not in the decimal, not in the one we'd be used to using. So many ways of saying so many things. Two would be what we were dealing with here and now.'