And that was why, after carefully wiping the make-up off her face with cold cream, the way that she had learned to do from magazines, Laura lay down in the hard, narrow bed and, despite the discomfort of the swell of the boat, she started reading the newspaper that Florence had given her. Most of the headlines, about delegates and conferences, policies and speeches, were too alien to hold her attention, but on an inside page she found a column about women’s lives, by one Sally Barker, which mentioned the importance of men taking a role in domestic work if their wives were to take their place in the revolution. The writer talked about how too many women were trapped at home in America, while in Russia women were able to take their place next to their menfolk in the factories. ‘There we see no selfish husbands who expect servants rather than companions, and no nagging wives who realise life has passed them by. We see women who proudly go out and put their shoulder to the wheel, and men who are not ashamed to rock the cradle.’ Laura read it idly, but after she had put the newspaper down and turned out her light, its words kept drifting through her mind.
And as she slept, the words of the article seemed to thicken and take shape in her dreams, so that Sally Barker took on the form of one of her old teachers from school. She was sitting, in her dream, with Laura in her own living room at home and they were watching her mother sewing a skirt, but then gradually she realised that her mother was stitching the skirt onto Laura’s own body, and she felt ashamed in case her teacher could see the little stains on the skirt where her blood was seeping. It was a surreal, nonsensical dream, she thought when she woke in the small hours, her heart pounding, but she could still feel her panic. As she woke properly, she realised that it was physical discomfort that had woken her, and she struggled out of the bed and staggered to the bathroom to retch over the toilet. As she lay back down again, the ship’s swell seemed greater than ever, and the room horribly claustrophobic in the darkness, and she lay uneasily until she heard the sounds of people coming and going in the corridor and thought it might be time for breakfast.
In the restaurant there was no sign of Florence or the journalist, and so she sat self-consciously on her own. When the waiter put the toast and coffee in front of her, to her horror she realised that she was feeling ill again, and she had to rush out of the restaurant to the nearest bathroom. As she washed her hands and mouth in the little basin, she saw how tired and pinched her face looked in the mirror, and rather than return to the restaurant she went out onto the deck.
‘Feeling okay?’ a voice said to her from a deckchair, and Laura turned to see Joe sitting there.
‘Not my best,’ she muttered.
‘Sit here and eat this,’ he said, offering her a bag of saltines with a casual gesture. Her instinct was to refuse, but then she realised she longed for one. ‘You’ll feel better soon. The weather’s calming, it was a bit of a rough night, wasn’t it? This ship has the worst vibrations of any I’ve ever known.’
‘Have you done this journey before?’
‘Just once. And once from Southampton to France, and down to Morocco and Egypt.’
Laura asked nothing about his travels, but someone as determined to talk as Joe was not to be put off by a lack of direct questions. He told Laura about the boat he’d taken to north Africa, about the film playing that afternoon in the ship’s cinema, which he had seen the previous week in New York, and he called the steward over for hot coffee. In such loquacious company Laura could relax a little, knowing that nothing was expected of her.
At one point he stopped and looked at the newspaper which Laura had put down at her feet. ‘You’re not a Red too, are you?’
‘Florence gave it to me—’
‘Still, they’re right about some things,’ Joe said, taking the newspaper and looking at the front page. ‘At least they get what’s going on in Europe. They don’t do the “if only, if only” – you know, “if only he was a nicer guy or he would accept this or that” – they can see that kind of stuff is all baloney, that there’s got to be a showdown sooner or later.’