Sam Grieve
SHARKS AND WHALES
At 5:00 each day Constance Deverley-Dorning sets out on her afternoon rounds. It is a habit she has kept up from girlhood in every place she has ever lived: Wicklehurst, France, London. And now, for these past two weeks, she walks around the deck, port out to the prow first, then starboard home, of course. After that it’s cocktails, then dinner. The ship has sailed thousands of miles, and she has probably walked miles too, but she has never been invited to the captain’s table.
Mrs. Deverley-Dorning dresses with irreproachable care. She wears a felt helmet and a warm wool dress, stockings, green shoes with buckles over the insole, and the chinchilla stole that dear Henry bought her. She walks with quick, deliberate steps, stopping only to murmur the merest acknowledgments to those who deserve recognition. It is better, she had decided, to be viewed as a shy lady than a Northerner, for no matter what she does, she cannot banish the broad Yorkshire from her tongue. The clothing is what really matters, though. Each evening, as the sun sinks low in the western sky and tugs the ship along its gold-strewn path, she parades, like a mannequin in one of Lady Duff-Gordon’s shows, down the length of the teak.
Mrs. Deverley-Dorning is not pretty and she knows it. She has a beaky nose, and thin lips with a tendency to chap. Her chin is too pointed, and her eyes do not sparkle, but as fate would have it, she has the right form for the moment, for these new vestments with their flat panels and narrow lines. With her hat low over her brow and her bright-red lipstick and her green shoes, she draws the eye, for not everything must be beautiful to be noticeable.
“Good evening, ma’am,” says Roland, a deck hand in tight trousers. He is folding up the deck chairs, lashing them together in ranks. “Storm coming in tonight, we’ve heard. Some big swell expected. But nothing to worry about,” he adds quickly.
“Oh, I’m not afraid.” She leans against the railing and watches him, the way his shoulders move beneath the fabric of his jacket. She never saw her husband engage in manual labor, and now she wishes she had; urged him, just for fun, to chop some wood or push a wheelbarrow.
“You been to Rio before, ma’am?” asks Roland.
She shakes her head, turns her eyes to the sea, the incandescent water. “It was my late husband’s dream. To travel.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” says Roland.
ϖ
Back in her cabin, windswept inside, outside, Mrs. Deverley-Dorning takes off her hat. She unbuttons her dress and steps out of her shoes and then, in her underclothes, lies on the narrow bed. Beneath her the boat pitches, rises, and her mind, too, swoops, ascends. She thinks of her mother sitting on her front steps, saying, Connie, your ideas, you’ll be the death of me. And her older brother, Winston, dead too (of malaria, nothing to do with her). It is a little chilly in the cabin, so she pulls the blanket over herself. The weave, scratchy and light as it is, presses on her skin, and that makes her think of Henry, of his body, the woolly weight of him. And then, without meaning to, she is thinking of Roland and his strong, brown, sailor hands, and then she is falling into that place she can’t describe in words, and she is doing that unspeakable thing until her mind and her body fuse and the stars come out, and for a few blissful moments, she is free.
ϖ
Mrs. Deverley-Dorning is forty-five years old but she could pass for thirty-eight. She stares into the mirror, powders her long nose. Tonight she will wear her coral silk dress and her woven India scarf that looks like falling water. Tonight she will put her herself in the major’s view, like a white seal amongst the grays. Mrs. Deverley-Dorning rubs rouge into her cheeks. Henry had liked her done up when he was alive, and she can almost sense him now behind her, a string of pearls, cool in his hand, waiting to be wrapped around her neck. She misses him more than she might have expected, although—and here she looks at herself square in the mirror—she does not regret the money he left her, not one bit. There is enough to buy a small flat or house outside of London. Or maybe even a hacienda in Argentina. When she had started in his employ as his housekeeper, the idea of all that wealth of her very own would have dazzled her, but now, well, she feels it is her due. His two sons, on the other hand, believe otherwise. She had heard them whispering in the drawing room.
She sits on the satin chair and unlocks her trunk. Her clothes she unpacked for the voyage; inside the canvas-lined space are her extras: her walking boots, a blanket, towels, linen, a sun hat. She slides her hands along the walls until her fingers locate what she is seeking. A gnarled lump beneath the fabric. Before she left London she’d packed their mother’s jewelry into the hidden pocket of her traveling trunk. What use would two young men have with a diamond tiara anyway?
ϖ
The saloon is busy, the men in their black tie, the woman scattered between them like bright droplets. Mrs. Deverley-Dorning sidles into conversation with the McAdam sisters, two Scots spinsters heading to Rio for adventure. They are all on first-name terms, have been for a week now, after a most enjoyable game of gin rummy.
Marye quavers, upon noticing her, “Dear Constance, you do look well. All that walking the deck. Brings out the bloom in your cheeks.”
“I saw whales today,” she says untruthfully.
“Really? Southern Rights? Oh my!”
Marye and Fiona are mad about whales. They talk about them every night. They talk about them so much that Constance can be left to her own thoughts. Now, as Fiona kindly fills her in on the mating patterns of the species, she sees the major at the bar, surrounded by a group of gentlemen. The major’s body is almost spherically round, like a life buoy or little celestial body. He sports long, gray mustaches, perhaps to conceal his cheeks, which are run through with tiny veins, a river delta filled with dark blood.
Tonight I will approach him, Constance tells herself. Tonight I will make him see me.
“It has been posited,” says Fiona, “that the song of the humpback whale might have been Odysseus’s siren song…”
The major is moving toward the dining room, behind the captain. The top table again! What she would give for an invitation, but she knows it will never happen. She is lumped in with all the other single women, and Rev. Raffety, of course, and ghastly Mr. Pepys.
“I would so love to be a whale,” says Marye.
“Would you?” She turns back to the sisters. “Why?”
“The freedom,” says Marye. “And I do so love to sing.”
The gong tolls, lingering and long. The salon empties out; the diners make their bow-legged way across the floor. Constance stalls, pulls her shawl over her shoulders, pats the firm waves of her hair. The rear of the bar is mirrored in squares, and she sees herself fragmented and reflected, over and over: her too-long nose, her graduated pearls, her somber coral dress. She sees herself but sees, too, the pieces she shares with others. Her mother’s sketchy eyebrows, as though the maker’s pen had run out of ink; Winston’s bony jaw. And her heart, just like that, clenches up in her chest.
ϖ
There were three of them growing up—Winston, Constance, Thomas. She was the cheese in the sandwich, wedged in between the two boys. What they did, she did. They climbed trees and built forts and raced paper boats down the brook. Pelted birds with homemade catapults. Until, when she was twelve, her mother forbade her.
“Why can’t I do what they do?” she’d protested. “I’m just as good as them.”
“Oh, Connie,” said her mother. “You and your ideas.”
ϖ
Thomas was her brother’s best friend. His family managed the farm next door. He was wild but brilliant. Hidings were a source of pride for him. “Look at my arse,” he would say, and he’d pull down his trousers enough so that she and Winston could admire the strap marks.
ϖ
The gong again, clanging through her bones. Dinner will be served in five minutes. She is alone in the saloon. She moves with care, balancing her weight against the tipping floor. Above her head the chandelier tinkles, casts its shattered light like a farmer sowing seed. The dining room is full, her table awaits, the Scottish sisters already deep in conversation with Mr. Pepys, who is nodding his oily head in oily agreement. The major sits across from the captain, and the captain is against the far wall. The major will not see her now, making an entrance, but still she firms up her shoulders and, with all the elegance she can muster, traverses the carpet.
“Mrs. Deverley-Dorning,” says the reverend, creaking to his feet to pull out her chair. “You do look hale.”
She smiles and slides into her seat. A waiter places bowls of consommé before them. The soup sloshes up the porcelain sides as the ship dips and dives.
“Only two days left on this vessel,” says the reverend. “I shall be glad to see the back of it.”
Only two days! Over Marye’s shoulder Constance can see the major, the swollen rolls of his neck. Tonight, she thinks, tonight.
“I don’t believe we have spoken much,” says the reverend. “I do know, of course, about your husband, my most sincere condolences. May he rest in peace.” And here he presses his white napkin against his lips like blotting paper. “May I ask, were you blessed with children?”
She shakes her head, lowers her spoon into her broth. “I do have stepsons. My husband was previously married. He had four boys. Two died in the war. Verdun. The youngest were still at school.”
“The war.” The reverend lifts another dripping mouthful to his lips. “Such a dreadful time. Pray we never find ourselves again so embroiled. I, too, lost loved ones. My brother, Freddie. Such brave young men.”
“They were.” She feels the sudden sting of tears, a crochet needle hooking her eyelids, blinks them away.
“There is,” continues the reverend, “a war hero among us. Did you know? Major Edmund Digby. There, see him? He is behind dear Miss de Souta, facing the captain. Was awarded the VC. Exceptional fellow. Courageous as they come.”
“Really?” says Constance. “I had no idea. A war hero. How lucky we are.”
ϖ
A waiter hovers at her shoulder; she senses the warmth of him, the pulse of his flesh beneath his clothes. Her bowl is lifted, replaced by a plate. Lamb chops still pink in the center, a pile of peas with the grayish sheen of a tin, and mashed potatoes. The pink of the lamb turns her stomach. She pushes the chop away with her fork, covers it with the pasty mash. She hasn’t eaten meat since the war. Not since the tents. All that blood everywhere. All that flesh. She was drowning in blood. They all were.
ϖ
“I was a nurse,” she says. “Out on the front.”
“My dear,” says the reverend. “How brave of you. And what a blessing for our troops. To have your gracious hand upon their fevered brows.”
She nods, sips her wine, pulls her shawl a little closer. It took her two years to get the cold out of her bones. All that mud, up to her hems. What should have been inside turned out, and she up to her elbows in it.
“I did my best,” she says. “For king and country.”
ϖ
Pudding, a proper pudding, steamed with custard. This she can devour. The boat leans to the left, farther, farther; a candlestick tumbles to the floor. She hears wails from the second-class dining hall.
“Imagine the hullabaloo in third,” someone quips and they all laugh. She drinks her wine in neat, quick gulps. They are on the up now, righting, but the swell is rising.
“’Twill be a rough night, I fear,” says the reverend.
The sisters stand, bid all sweet dreams, and hurry out, bracing themselves against each other, against the heaving sea. She finishes her pudding, puts her bread roll in her pocket. The reverend says, “May I escort you back to your cabin?” He is upright now, holding out his crooked arm like a broken wing.
“You are so kind but I am quite all right.”
He nods, relieved, and teeters off, his cane tapping across the carpet.
ϖ
She sits and sits. At the captain’s table the women have left, the captain himself has left, the remaining men are on to cigars and port. She watches them. They remind her of animals in the wild, oblivious to the hunter in his hide. There are, she thinks, some advantages to being a woman of a certain age. Particularly a dull and respectable woman. The invisibility, for one. She takes a sip of her wine, thinks back to when she was young, eighteen, with bosoms far bigger than her frame had intended. They had given her—and she snorts lightly—weight in the world. In those days she could never have sat the lone female in a roomful of men. She runs a light finger across her chest. They’ve gone now, eroded away by life; she’s almost as flat-chested as a boy.
“Cheese, Mrs. Deverley-Dorning? We have a Stilton tonight and a vintage cheddar.” The steward is back. Steward. Such a strange, old word. As though they are kings and queens in this floating castle with their courtiers.
“A little whiskey too, please,” she murmurs, “for my digestion.”
He has gotten fat, the major, since Ypres. Not that he was particularly thin then. He looks like a man who has had a good life, who has never really known want. Even out there that class ate well enough. She watches him slide a hunk of Stilton through his lips. Crumbs fly from his mouth; a Carr’s water biscuit macerated and taking flight on his breath.
She sips her whiskey, lets it roll like liquid fire around her tongue. Her mind drifts back to that day. A concrete-colored sky, dipped in flames in the east. White smoke. The stench of gunpowder, which, as preposterous as it was, had ignited happy feelings, memories of Guy Fawkes. Bobbing for pippins in a wooden barrel. Rockets whistling through white coils of smoke against the darkening sky. A day like any other day out there, ripped from normal life at the seams. That young man she had been working on, what was his name again? Edwin? Not even twenty and a hole the size of an orange in his skull, yet still alive. They had brought them in on stretchers, one after another, an endless ruin, and she had got to work, compresses, bandages, forcing herself to see only what she had to, the broken flesh, the wounds, not what was whole and did not need tending. She could not look at the whole man or else she would lose her mind.
Then, “Sister Bryce! You are needed. Major Digby. Green Howards.”
ϖ
An apple rolls up the carpet, an apple rolls down the carpet, the ship heaves ho. The whiskey, her second finger, rises in her blood, tickles her brain. She winds the tablecloth around her knuckles. She is beginning to feel she is under water, the world shrunk to the size of a bucket. She shuts her eyes, sees Thomas lifting his dripping head from the pail, a pippin in his teeth, his mouth not big enough for the grin it can hold.
She should go back to her cabin, to the little armchair and the mahogany armoire and the purloined tiara. She should go and lie down. Her stomach lurches up, down. Two days. Only two days. She wants to cry. The men chortle, a colony of sea lions honking. The steward crab-walks across the floor to serve them.
The whiskey rises in her and the ship rises under her and now she feels her anger growing, a fist tightening. She’d thought it a happy accident when she’d boarded, seen the passenger rolls. A thing meant to be. She thought it would all come together. That somehow it would all make sense, that she’d get her reckoning, but now she sees it is not so.
The apple rolls back down the floor, a waxed, red cricket ball. Her chair is sliding. Her cheeks are wet with tears. It’s hopeless. Hopeless. She staggers to the door. Holds the walls as she moves down the corridor. The ship corkscrews starboard but her head is spinning; she is not sure if it is the vessel or her own horizon line tilting. She falls onto her bed, face-down in her coral dress. The apple is in her hand. Oh. She must have picked it up. She presses its fragrant skin against her mouth and thinks of Thomas in the orchard, the sun-hot skin of his forearms. “I love you,” he whispers into the nape of her neck, as though the saying of it is a secret thing. They are sixteen years old and smitten. She is going to be a farmer’s wife. She presses the apple against her lips, imagines an alternative history: her hands rough from picking, the warm autumnal light. The ship shoulders into a swell, shudders violently, groans.
We are going down, she thinks. Ah, well.
ϖ
She wakes up in dim light. A feeble dawn drains through the porthole. She kneels on the bed and peers through the salt-stained glass. There is a song in her head. The one Thomas sang. About the mermaid.
It was on the broad Atlantic.
The sun is a miserable sallow under a muslin of cloud.
Dum dum something, gales.
He used to sing it at the top of his lungs. She pulls on her stockings and shoes and a cardigan over her dress. She feels in her trunk for the tiara, its cold spines, lays it on her head. She ties her blue scarf over it to secure it down.
A young fellow fell overboard.
The corridor is empty at this early hour, the exit door heavy. She must shoulder into it against the violence of the wind. It smacks the air from her lungs, leaves her gasping. She makes her way along the railing, her clothes wet with spray.
Amongst the sharks and whales.
Thomas, Thomas, Thomas. She remembers kissing him, pressing her tongue against his cheek just below his cheekbone, where his beard began. The hot, sea-salt taste of him. My May Queen, he had called her, tucking apple blossoms into her hair. The war would be over by Christmas. Everyone said so. It made her fizz up inside, like a sherbet, to think how brave he was. In the orchard she let him lift her skirt, push his hand down the collar of her blouse. He smelled of dust and sun and work. She should not let him do that thing to her, but oh, she could not stop.
Salt in her eyes, sea or tears, it is all one. She wraps her fingers around the railing. She puts her right foot on the lower rung. The water looks cold and gray. She thinks, I just need a minute to get my breath. She puts her head down between her hands. She is just so dreadfully tired.
The noise, when it reaches her, is like a bird’s call. An albatross? She lifts her head. A man is standing upwind from her, stout, in pajamas, and lashed by the spray. She recognizes the shape of him.
ϖ
“Sister Bryce! The major! Hurry, Sister Bryce.”
He’s on a stretcher at the far end of the tent, curled up in pain. She opens his coat, then his shirt, her fingers quick on the brass buttons. She exposes his bare chest, a triangle of soft, colorless hair, his unmarked belly. She takes it all in. His stocky legs. His head, damp, dirty, but in one piece. The smell of him, acrid. The wholeness.
“What is wrong?” she cries. “Where are you hurt?” And he howls and points at his side. She moves her hands over his flesh like a lover, exploring. Nothing. Nothing on his flanks or his back or his arms. She can feel her heart beating. The noise in the tent is rising, a wave of cresting around her. Appendicitis? She prods him; he does not move. His skin is as cool as hers, cooler even.
“I’ll send the doctor over,” she says. “Stay still. I’ll send the doctor.”
ϖ
There’s that noise again. A faint caw. She squints. The major is sinking into himself, a souffle losing air. She can make out the whites of his eyes. She pulls herself along the railing into the wind, one hand knitting over the other. Her fingers are blue with cold. The major is only yards away, hunched up and gasping. She takes a few more steps. He is clutching his left arm; his pajamas flap wide. He looks like a frightened boy. For the briefest of moments, their eyes meet. Then he crumples over, does not move.
ϖ
She only stitches it together afterward. Thomas dead of his injuries. A major acting against his orders. “It was a massacre,” his friend Lionel confided, “although they are telling it different, the army, ain’t they? Making him a hero. We saw him, though, those of us who were well enough. Not a drop of blood on him and on a stretcher and all. Everyone scurrying ’cos an officer was injured.”
ϖ
She made a vow before God when she became a nurse. “I will devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care.” She had meant every word of it.
Up ahead the major lies on the deck.
Down he went like a streak of light.
His pajamas flap in the wind. She should put him in the recovery position. She should scream for help. She should massage his heart, keep him warm.
So quickly down went he.
Instead she goes back the way she came. Across the slick deck and through the door and back into her cabin. Once inside she peels off her wet clothes, throws them on the floor, and wraps herself in her gown. In the mirror the tiara glitters in the wet snarl of her hair. She can still see her hands on his uninjured body. While Thomas, her Thomas, was dying a few beds away.
Until he came to a mermaid, at the bottom of the deep blue sea.
ϖ
Mrs. Deverley-Dorning stands at the prow of the ship. She wears her green shoes, and her cream dress, and the chinchilla that dear Henry gave her. “Look,” she says to the chinchilla, lifting its glass eyes toward the land. “Rio at last.”
Around the boat the water is as emerald as her shoes, the swell a gentle rock. Fiona and Marye stand nearby, peering through their binoculars.
“Marye,” cries Fiona. “A minke!” And both sisters hang over the railings like two little girls watching a parade.
“Are you staying in Rio long?” asks Mrs. Deverley-Dorning.
“We’re going bird watching,” the sisters tell her, “up the Amazon. You could join us? We are hoping to see blue macaws.”
“No, thank you,” says Mrs. Deverley-Dorning, shaking her head. “I am heading home.”
“Heading home? Back to London?” The sisters are upright now, gaping at her. “But we haven’t even arrived!”
“I know,” says Mrs. Deverley-Dorning, smiling. “This was my husband’s dream. My work here is done.”
Mrs. Deverley-Dorning walks back down the deck and through the atrium lounge. There are apples in a bowl on a table. She picks one up, then settles down in a deck chair outside. The sun is warm on her face. Mrs. Deverley-Dorning polishes the apple fastidiously against the wool of her skirt until it shines as bright as a new day. Then she presses it against her lips and bites into it.
Sam Grieve is fiction writer based in Connecticut. She was born on the southern tip of Africa and left part of her heart here. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, including PANK, Daily Science Fiction, and Southern Indiana Review.