East of the Sun by Julia Gregson Read Free Book Online Page B

chaperones—but we have our tales to tell, too.”
    “True, all like to work?????” she scribbled to herself. Well, it would do for now. She was about to describe their plumage, which in her case was quite atypical. Now she’d returned the woolly tweeds to Mrs. Driver, she was back in her own clothes—that morning, a scarlet silk dress, a dark ballet top left over from school, and a barbaric-looking silver necklace inherited from her mother.
    All of a sudden, her mouth filled with liquid and she put her pen down as the floor rose and fell along with her stomach. She glanced at the leaping room, its lamps and green leather desks—when did leather ever smell so sickening?—to see how the other passengers were doing. The walls creaked as she stood up. How hot-making! Not thirty-six hours out from Tilbury and she was going to be sick.
    “Excuse me, madam.” A waiter appeared with a gray and pink box and a glass of water.
    Oh no! Was it that obvious? She sat back with her eyes closed, trying not to feel the suck and swell of the waves. Breathe! Breathe! She tried not to listen to the faint tinkle of the glasses or the stupid laughter of people who thought rough weather was funny or the woman in the booth next to her who was asking for “a plate of egg sandwiches and some Earl Grey.” Egg sandwiches, uuggggh, how disgusting.
    “Missy.” The waiter stood at the door. He smiled kindly at her as she stumbled out onto the deck and into the deafening boom of the waves.
    “Thank you. I’m fine, thank you.”
    She rested her forehead on the railings and stayed there until she felt slightly better. The phrase she had been about to write swam mockingly in her head, the words dancingly disconnected. “You see I was not made for marriage, I was born with a knapsack on my back.”
    The steward brought her a deck chair and a rug. When she was sitting down, she thought, briefly, about Ottaline Renouf, one of her heroines, who’d gone halfway around the world in an eccentric variety of crafts: Danish fishing boats, banana boats, trawlers, Turkish caïques, never once mentioning seasickness. What if she wasn’t strong enough for this? What would that mean?
    By the time she stood up the sky was one huge gray and yellow bruise over the still-rearing waves. Night was falling and the lights had gone on. From the ship she could hear laughter and faint arpeggios of piano music rising and falling. How tinny it sounded against the animal roars of the waves.
    When she looked up again, she saw Guy Glover sitting on a deck chair behind a glass screen that sheltered him from the worst of the wind. He was wearing his black overcoat and smoking a cigarette. When he saw her looking at him, he held her gaze for a moment and raised his cigarette to his mouth. The look in his eye said Try and stop me. He inhaled deeply and exhaled, making a fishy shape with his lips as the wind blew his smoke ring away. He ground the cigarette under his heel and sauntered over to her. Pathetic, she thought, in his too large coat, trying hard to be what? Perhaps Valentino in The Sheik, complete with cape and dagger in boot, or maybe a rake on his first night at sea trying to decide which virgin to take to bed.
    He’s just a child, she tried to reassure herself, for the sight of him had made her anxious again, a foolish self-conscious child. Nothing to be frightened of.
    She’d shared a similar background, and her current thinking about him went as follows: like many boys of his class and background, he’d been turfed from the nest too young. Without parents on hand, or, in his case, siblings to chivvy him along, he’d become a permanent defensive guest, unsure of his welcome, uneasy in his skin. Underneath the studied indifference, the coldness, there was, she was almost certain of it, a boy hungry for love, angry about having to ask for it. She should at least try to understand him even if she couldn’t like him.
    “I meant to tell you,” he shouted over the