Making It Up by Penelope Lively Read Free Book Online Page B

later, they said. How much water was there? No good thinking about that. She tried to think about nothing at all, to focus on sounds—the creaking of the boat, the slap of water against the side—or just to stare at the back of the person in front of her, the paisley pattern of a blouse, the texture of the material. Now and again she changed Jean’s position a little; sometimes the little girl would whimper, which seemed promising.
    Occasionally she heard Mrs. Leech talking incoherently. People said she was hallucinating—didn’t understand where she was or what was happening. Which could be a mercy. For the rest of them, who understood only too well, there was nothing but the grim passage of time. The officer was constantly watching the sky and the horizon, his eyes screwed up against the glare; you knew what he was searching for.
    The sun crept down the sky. The water ration came round again. The teacher had been given some brandy; she was in a lot of pain from her arm. At one point, a girl passed out; they managed to lie her down for a bit in the well of the boat, but you couldn’t do that for long—they were so tightly packed, there simply wasn’t room.
    In the early evening, Jean died. Shirley knew at once: the stillness, the sense that something vital was gone from the body across her lap.
    She sat on, as the sun sank, as the light began to drain from the sky, as the moon’s disk rose above the horizon. She was so tired that she felt numb; sometimes she drifted into a kind of floating state, and then would come to with a lurch, aware again of the people crowded around her, of Jean inert across her knees.
    In the wastes of the night she must have slid deeply into this condition—some sort of mockery of sleep. And then people’s voices came rooting in—she heard them but seemed unable to respond, to feel anything at all. They were saying that there was a destroyer, that it had seen them. It’s over, they were saying, it’s over, we’re going to be picked up.
    But it isn’t over, she thought. It has only just begun. She knew that the sinking ship had taken with it a whole life that she would never live, a time that would never be. Jean’s cold little body lay across her knees, and all she could think was that Jean hadn’t known about death, she didn’t even know what death was.
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    This never happened. Or rather, it did not happen to me—to us, to the triumvirate of my mother, my nanny, and myself, who did indeed flee Egypt during the run-up to the battle of El Alamein, but not to go to South Africa. We went to Palestine, and that is another story, part of the indestructible fabric of my life, of our lives. The fate of the sunken ship is confabulation, and so are all who sailed in her. Shirley Manners is not Lucy, my real-life nanny; but there was a girl in Cairo in the early 1940s whom the other nannies called Film Star, and by some perverse quirk of memory I know this still, though I don’t remember her at all. I have given her a fictional reincarnation, for her to speak for a time, and a place, and a climate of opinion and of behavior.
    There were Japanese U-boats active in the Mozambique Channel in June and July of 1942. Twenty Allied ships were sunk by these before they withdrew at the end of July. Shipping traffic was dense up and down the east coast of Africa, with most vessels sailing independently, since antisubmarine escorts were not available. One of those sunk ships could have been carrying British civilian passengers, along with military personnel. For some reason, my mother had decided to head for Palestine, rather than South Africa, thus twitching me away from that particular whirlpool, or rapid, or treacherous rock.

The Albert Hall
    I came to England at the age of twelve, just before the end of the war, to an alien place of astonishing cold and a social system that was mysterious to me. I had spent my childhood in