Here and there she saw Evelyn and her group. The ship, which had seemed immense the first day when she had walked it from stem to stern, going into every room and club and restaurant, admiring the gleam of the wood and the shine of the windows, now felt small and well trod. The night she had gone out with the astronomers, she had come back, her eyes sparkling with the refracted light of a thousand stars, her mind full of stories and wishes and daydreams and myths, and had passed Evelyn and the crowd of them, drunk and laughing down the hallway, here and there colliding with one of the stateroom doors, careless of the people sleeping inside.
Each night, a small ensemble played in the conservatory, and the ship’s staff set up a tiny dance floor over the carpet, where the bridge tables stood during the day. One night as Margie passed through on her way to her stateroom, she saw Evelyn and one of the men in the center of the floor, dancing close and slow in the dim light. Evelyn’s hands were draped casually over the man’s shoulders, and she held a champagne glass loosely between her fingers, as though she had only interrupted her drink for a moment. Their friends were gathered on a cluster of chairs in the corner, leaning together like the stones of an elegant ruin, exploding occasionally with laughter. The next morning, Margie had sat there with her tea in the same chairs and tried to capture the feel of them, had leaned close to the cushions to catch the scent of the girls’ perfume, but all she could smell was stale smoke and the pale memory of magic. It wasn’t the room; it was the people in it. And Margie feared she held no magic in her at all.
As the ship came closer and closer to Cherbourg, Margie began to grow nervous. It was fine to let Evelyn roam around the ship with that crowd. It was a contained space, and short of falling overboard, what could happen to her? But in Europe, she would be Margie’s responsibility again.
Still, when the ship docked, surely the young men and women with whom Evelyn had allied herself would take off to wherever they were bound, and she and Evelyn would be alone. And they had an itinerary. They had tickets, and their mothers had written and wired ahead for hotel reservations. It would all be fine, she told herself, quelling the nervousness in her belly.
On the morning of their arrival, Margie got up early to see the ship’s docking, the comforting sight of land instead of the endless flow of ocean, the scurry of activity on the dock below, the huge ship pulling alongside the pier and the ramps being set up. Breakfast was served early, and she ate in silence with the other sleepy-eyed passengers, caught between exhaustion and excitement. She paused on the deck on the way back to the room, watching the people disembarking below, lifting their heads to smell the air, to look at the sun, the porters scurrying about, loading luggage onto trolleys to take to the train station.
Evelyn, of course, hadn’t been back to the room the night before, and Margie was feeling more and more anxious. But when she returned to the stateroom after breakfast, there was Evelyn, packing her trunk. Or, more precisely, there was Evelyn, sitting among the wreckage of her belongings, the trunk taking up nearly all the empty space on the stateroom floor, while Evelyn herself lounged on her bed in her dressing gown, flipping through a magazine. “Oh, hello.” She seemed entirely unsurprised to see Margie, as though she hadn’t been purposely avoiding her all week long. “Isn’t packing dreadful?”
“I suppose it is, yes,” Margie said tentatively, quashing her irritation, wondering if this casual conversation indicated some thaw in Evelyn’s demeanor. She hoped when they got off the ship, when it was just the two of them again, Evelyn would calm down, express an interest in helping to choose the museums and monuments they were to visit. After all, how could she not be excited at what lay ahead of them? They were to spend the next two weeks in Paris, and Margie wondered how they were possibly to see it all: the museums and the boulevards, the shops and the cafés. All week long, Margie had been dreaming of the adventures they might have. And the management of the trip had been given to her—their money, their passports, their hotel reservations, and the list of educational things they were to do, not that Margie felt entirely bound to those plans. Why, if Evelyn wanted to spend an afternoon shopping, or if they decided to take a day trip to Versailles, there was no harm in it. Freedom, glorious, delicious freedom, stretched out in front of her like a promise. And even though Evelyn had expressed no interest in Paris, other than to ask in which hotel they were staying, Margie was certain she would come around once she saw it.
“It will be nice to be off the ship, won’t it? It’s feeling a bit claustrophobic.”
“Definitely,” Evelyn said. The thought seemed to cheer her, and she hopped out of bed and began to fold some dresses carelessly and put them in the trunk. “I can’t wait to see Paris.”
“Me too!” Margie didn’t even bother to hide her glee. She was a hopeless sap, and she knew it, but how could she be expected to hold back her anticipation? She was going to Europe. She was following in the footsteps of Edith Hull and May Sinclair, Gertrude Atherton and Edith Wharton, of all the writers she had loved and admired for so long.