Mary and Pim arrived half an hour after she did. Laura was smoking on deck to calm her nerves. Pim’s hair fell in wisps under her hat, and her face had a fresh color. Admiring looks filtered in from the other passengers. Mary seemed harried. She had, Laura understood, a mass of donations—bandages and sachets and pajamas and things—that she must chivvy across the ocean.
They joined Laura at the rail after they got their baggage settled. Mary accepted when Laura offered her a cigarette. Pim wrinkled her nose. Clouds were coming in. The turbines roared. They watched the other passengers board. There were more women than men among the new arrivals, and they were nearly all wearing black.
“So many,” said Pim.
Laura drew on her cigarette. Some of their fellow passengers wore the extravagance of Victorian formal mourning, others merely shawls or armbands. They clung together, a flapping mass, like crows about to take flight. “They’re going over for news,” said Mary. “They besiege the Red Cross. They dog the generals with letters.It’s the modern world,they say.How can a man just vanish?”
“ ‘Go on your way to the shadowy abyss,’ ” Pim quoted softly. Her eyes hadn’t left the mass of black-clad people. “ ‘If with your singing you can placate the Furies, the monsters, and pitiless Death, you can take back your beloved.’ ” At Mary’s glance of surprise, shesaid, “Gluck. Well, Orpheus. Going after Eurydice. That’s what they’re all hoping for, isn’t it? Even you, Laura—” She stopped. Laura wasn’t listening. Just for a moment, she’d seen a spot of stillness in the moving mass of people. Seen a woman wearing a bloody housecoat, her eyes empty pools of scarlet.
Pim said, “Laura? Laura?”
Just a phantasm brought on by the stress of departure. “Sorry, woolgathering,” Laura said. “Can we go inside before we freeze, do you think?”
· · ·
Laura had never traveled on a passenger liner before. She’d got to Europe on a transport, in February of ’15, and returned on a hospital ship. She and Freddie had dreamed of traveling, of course. They’d been watching the ships come and go, peering out Laura’s upper window, since they were children. “She’s going to Russia,” Laura would say with authority, while the smokestack billowed on one ship or another, her imagination skipping away in blatant disregard for the actual routes of ocean liners. “She’s going to Saint Petersburg.”
“And,” Freddie would put in eagerly, “there’s a woman aboard who’s got a great diamond, the Northern Star, and she stole it from its rightful owner, a tsaritsa of the royal family—she is a disgraced servant girl, and now she is in a new situation, rich as Croesus because of that one jewel, but she cannot sell it or cut it so she is richandpoor and now she is going back to the land of her birth, always afraid the tsaritsa will get wind of her passage…”
Well, I’m getting on one of those ships now, Freddie,Laura thought to her brother’s absence.It’s not Petersburg. Just Liverpool, but that’s something, isn’t it? I wish…
She cut off that thought.
Their tickets were second-class. They had decent meals and a promenade deck, a library and a smoking room. Laura had nothing to do, and no one to care for, aside from the memorable night at dinner when she got a fish bone out of a choking old gentleman’s throat.
She slept a good deal. Read novels that did not tax her fractured concentration. Smoked innumerable cigarettes, and drank more than she ought to.
Pim chased Laura down in their berth one afternoon, brandishing scissors. Laura, trying to nap, was unamused. “Nurse found dead in a second-class stateroom with scissors through the heart?” They’d been reading murder mysteries to each other in the library.
“If anything, it would be ‘innocent widow from Halifax found dead’—you’re much more murderous than I am, for all you like to joke. Laura, stop glaring. I’m cutting your hair.”
“Oh,” said Laura. She dived under the blankets. “Absolutely not.” Her voice came out muffled. “Caps and veils will do extremely well for me, Mrs. Shaw, and you may brandish your scissors at someone else.”
“Oh, no, you don’t.Isee your head, and it pains me. You shouldn’t be asleep anyway,” added Pim, virtuously. “It’s teatime.” Mercifully, she’d stopped waving the scissors.
“I’m not asleep now,” said Laura with some resentment.
“You’re worse than a five-year-old boy. Your hair won’t take but a moment. Why don’t you want to?”
“Because I want my tea.” Laura sat up, feeling rumpled. Pim was neat from pinned-up hair to booted feet.
“You can— Laura, if I am being a prat, you may murder me after all, but—even battle-scarred war heroes like yourself are allowed to look pretty.”
“Oh, Christ, don’t be charitable,” said Laura, rubbing her face. “I was having such a nice nap.”
Pim said, “And you are. Pretty, I mean. A good man won’t care about your hands, or your leg.”
“So very earnest. But he will care about my hair?”
Pim met Laura’s eyes, flushed suddenly, and put down the scissors. “No, not at all. Let’s go to tea, then.”
If Pim had insisted, Laura thought wryly, she’d probably have kept balking. “No, you’re right.” She stood up and plunked herself down at the chair in front of the tiny vanity.
“My,” said Pim. “Now you look like a cat about to have a bath.” But she picked up the scissors. “You’ll see. You’ll never be Empress Sisi, but how about roguish curls?” She gave Laura a critical look. “I think I can manage that.”
“I should like to see you try.”
“Just wait,” said Pim, with the confidence of the very beautiful. Laura sighed, and let Pim have her way. It had been a long time since Laura cared about her hair. Although, now she was thinking of it, shehadwept, when she first cut it. God, that was long ago. While she was in training, Laura had imagined, in her most secret impractical dreams, that she’d meet someone in France. A young aristocrat maybe. An officer. A flier. That they’d fall passionately in love, that they’d wed, bound eternally by shared adventures.
