East of the Sun by Julia Gregson Read Free Book Online

Havana Band.
    “No second-class passengers to even think of showing their common little mugs in first class,” Tor continued, “and there will be fancy-dress parties, deck quoits and bridge evenings, a talk on snakebites and sunstroke in the Simla Bar given by Lieutenant Colonel Gorman when we get to Port Said. Dinner jackets and long dresses to be worn each night. Oh! And fornication.”
    “Oh, Tor, stop it.” Rose took a sip from her glass and then put it down. “What’s that?” she said. There was a great creaking noise coming from the direction of the porthole, followed by the thud of an engine, the running of feet above their heads.
    “Only the wind, my lovely.” Tor glanced toward the porthole, toward the waves, gray and tumbling. “Following us into the fathomless depths.”
    “I shan’t have any more crème de menthe,” said Rose, who was looking a bit green.
    “Well, I will,” said Tor, “otherwise I might just die of excitement.”

Chapter Seven
    Bay of Biscay
    T he sea: long glistening hollows laced with creamy foam; broken ice creams, clamor, bang, smack of waves. Reptilian hiss of ship as it glides through sea. Color of potato peelings at Tilbury, now a deep dense green.
    “NO CLICHÉS,” Viva Holloway wrote in capital letters in her new leather-bound journal. “GET ON WITH SOME PROPER WORK.”
    This habit of writing bossy notes to herself often surfaced at times of strain. When she was a child, and at her convent boarding school in Wales, she’d imagined them being dictated by her father, Alexander Holloway, railway engineer, late of Simla, who was in heaven but looking down on her, monitoring her progress. Later, in London, where she’d arrived at the age of eighteen, this moving finger moved, too, full of advice on how she should survive this big bad city where she knew nobody and was frighteningly poor; it was always ready to tick her off about dithering or regrets or extravagance or self-pity.
    She turned the page and wrote:
    THINGS TO DO IN INDIA
Write for a minimum of one and a half hours a day.
Look for work immediately, but not as lady’s companion or nanny.
Write to Mabel Waghorn about collecting trunk.
    “You must NOT go to Simla,” she bossed herself in the margin, “until you have earned enough money to do so. Very bad idea !”
    Money was something she worried about constantly. Guy Glover’s aunt had promised to send her one hundred and sixty pounds in a banking order before the ship left, but the posts had come and gone, and the fare plus the money for their train tickets had come from her own dwindling savings.
    At the last moment her old employer, Nancy Driver, had slipped a ten-guinea bonus into the leather journal that had been her farewell present. She’d been given twenty-five pounds by Rose’s mother and twenty-five pounds from Tor’s, but now survival depended on her being able to supplement her income by writing articles.
    She turned another page and took a deep breath. She was sitting in the far corner of the ship’s writing room where, at other lamp-lit desks set at discreet distances from her own, a handful of other passengers were dutifully scratching away. From where she sat, she could see gray waves and gray skies and a horizon that moved up and down like pantomime scenery. They were in the Bay of Biscay, and the steward who had ushered her in here had cheerfully assured her that the waves would get rougher as the morning went on, a piece of intelligence she was determined to ignore.
    “THE FISHING FLEET by Viva Holloway,” she wrote in bold letters at the top of the page; she added a fancy squiggle to both F s while she put the top of her pen in her mouth.
    “There are, roughly speaking, three kinds of women on board the Kaisar-i-Hind, ” she began.
    She stared out to sea for a while, trying to decide whether she would post this, or try to send it by telegram, which would be shockingly expensive. Its final destination would be a shabby bedsit in