Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester Page B

cigarette tin. ‘The thing is …’
    I took a breath, and as I did so, David started laughing. Now it was I who was getting angry. He laughed for some time. Then he took a fat envelope out of his jacket and gave it to me. I opened it. There were twenty ten-pound notes: two hundred pounds. The notes seemed huge, the biggest I had ever seen. It was the amount we had agreed on to buy out my one-sixth share of the Plough.
    ‘David –’ I began. He just shook his head.
    ‘Standing there with your long fucking face all fucking year,’ he said. ‘I tell you, it’s so easy getting up your nose, it’s almost no fun.’
    ‘How? Two hundred quid, how?’
    ‘None of your business,’ he said in a final way. I never did find out. I think he borrowed some of it and won the rest at the races.

Chapter Two
    SS Darjeeling , a P&O ship, was leaving in September from Tilbury docks for Hong Kong via Marseilles, the Suez canal and Calcutta. I bought a ticket for £ 35. When I told my grandmother, she was standing in the kitchen of the Plough making a pot of tea. She showed no expression, but asked me how long I would be gone. I said I didn’t know. I also realised for the first time how upset the thought of my leaving made her; it was something I had deliberately prevented myself from seeing. Later she gave me a gold necklace that had belonged to her mother.
    ‘This is to sell if you need the money in an emergency. To get you home.’ The next few weeks were difficult.
    I said my goodbyes at the Plough rather than the docks.
    ‘Good luck, Tommy son,’ said David as we shook hands.
    ‘Write,’ said my grandmother. ‘God bless, see all the things you want to see. Write.’
    In the end I had two suitcases, not just the one. I took the train to London Bridge and then, for the first time in my life, a taxi. London was exotic, crowded and brown. The docks were the busiest thing I had ever seen. My stiff shiny passport, never used, was checked by a customs man whose uniform looked so spick he was something out of a film. Then I was sent over to the Darjeeling , much smaller and lower in the water than I had expected. My mind’s eye was seeing something like the Queen Mary , a floating castle of lights. This looked only a few steps up from a tramp steamer. I asked the man in charge of allocating cabins how many passengers there were.
    ‘Good few,’ he said without looking up from his clipboard. He was Scottish.
    I had heard about shipboard romances. The trip to Hong Kong would take six weeks. He had the plan for the dining room, at which the sittings were to be unchanged for the whole voyage. I said:
    ‘Any single women at my table? Please say yes.’
    ‘Aye, a pair of sisters. They’re getting on in Marseilles.’ He gave me an amused look as he handed back my ticket. I took it to be a token of male conspiracy or fellow feeling.
    My cabin was tiny but because the ship was not full and I had it to myself, I had the choice of sleeping on the upper or lower tier of the bunk. There was a washbasin and a chair. The cubicle bathroom fitted a shower and a WC into the floor space the size of a doormat. The folding chair, I was to find, creaked and wobbled underneath one in rough weather.
    There was no formal dinner on that first day. It was assumed that we had ‘taken care of ourselves’, as the purser explained it. He was a fleshy, oily man whose uniform buttons were always shiny and whose skin often had a sheen of sweat. He had a faint air of corruption which I came to think of as characteristic of his job. I had had nothing to eat since breakfast, and so stood at the rail as the ship left the dock conscious not of any large feelings about leaving England so much as of a bitter, cavernous emptiness in my stomach. Most of the other passengers and some of the crew had people at the dockside waving them off. A smart young married couple were seen off by both sets of parents, who stayed on the quay until we had gone out of sight round a