The Woman in Cabin 10 (4 page)

- CHAPTER 4 -

I
was sleeping a deep, stupefied sleep, as if I’d been drugged, when the alarm dragged me to consciousness a few hours later.

I didn’t know how long it had been going off, but I suspected a long, long time. My head ached, and I lay for a long moment trying to orientate myself before I managed to reach out and silence the clock in case it woke Judah.

I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and stretched, trying to work the kinks from my neck and shoulders, and then levered myself painfully up to vertical, climbed out of bed, and made my way through to Judah’s kitchen. While the coffee percolated, I took my pills, and then hunted in the bathroom for painkillers. I found ibuprofen and paracetamol, as well as something in a brown plastic bottle that I vaguely remembered Judah being prescribed when he twisted his knee in a football match. I opened the childproof lid and inspected the pills inside. They were huge, half-red and half-white, and looked impressive.

In the end I chickened out of taking them, and instead pressed two ibuprofen and a fast-acting paracetamol into my palm from the assorted blister packs on the bathroom shelf. I gulped them down with a cup of coffee—black, there was no milk in the empty fridge—and then sipped the rest of the cup more slowly as I thought about last night, about my stupid actions, about Judah’s announcement. . . .

I was surprised. No, more than surprised—I was shocked. We’d never really discussed his plans long-term, but I knew he missed his friends in the US, and his mum and younger brother—neither of whom I’d met. What he’d done . . . had he done it for himself? Or for us?

There was half a cup of coffee left in the jug, and I poured it into a second mug and carried it carefully through to the bedroom.

Judah was lying sprawled across the mattress as if he’d fallen there. People in films always look peaceful in sleep, but Judah didn’t. His battered mouth was hidden beneath his upflung arm, but with his angular nose and furrowed brow he looked like an angry hawk, shot down by a gamekeeper midflight and still pissed off about it.

I set the coffee cup very gently on his bedside table and, putting my face close on the pillow next to him, I kissed the back of his neck. It was warm, and surprisingly soft.

He stirred in his sleep, putting out one long tanned arm to loop over my shoulders, and his eyes opened, looking three shades darker than their usual hazel brown.

“Hey,” I said softly.

“Hey.” He scrunched up his face and yawned, and then pulled me down beside him. For a moment I resisted, thinking of the boat and the train and the car waiting for me at Hull. Then my limbs seemed to melt like plastic and I let myself fold into him, into his warmth. We lay there staring into each other’s eyes, and I reached out and tentatively touched the Steri-Strip across his lip.

“Think it’ll re-root?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I hope so, I’ve got to go to Moscow tomorrow, and I don’t want to be messing around with dentists while I’m out there.”

I said nothing. He closed his eyes and stretched, and I heard his joints click as he did. Then he rolled onto his side and put his cupped hand gently over my bare breast.

“Judah . . .” I said. I could hear the mix of exasperation and longing in my voice.

“What?”

“I can’t. I’ve got to go.”

“So go.”

“Don’t. Stop that.”

“Don’t, stop? Or don’t stop?” He gave a slow lopsided smile.

“Both. You know which one I mean.” I pulled myself upright and shook my head. It hurt, and I regretted the movement instantly.

“Your cheek okay?” Judah asked.

“Yeah.” I put a hand up to it. It was swollen, but not as much as before.

His face was troubled, and he put out a finger to stroke the bruise, but I flinched away in spite of myself.

“I should have been there,” he said.

“Well, you weren’t,” I said snappishly, more snappishly than I’d meant to. “You never are.”

He blinked and pulled himself up on his elbows to look at me, his face still soft with sleep, crumpled with marks from his pillow.

“What the . . . ?”

“You heard me.” I knew I was being unreasonable, but the words came tumbling out. “What’s the future, Jude? Even if I move in here—what’s the plan? Do I sit here weaving my shroud like Penelope and keeping the home fires burning while you drink Scotch in some bar in Russia with the other foreign correspondents?”

“Where’d this come from?”

I just shook my head and swung my legs out of bed. I began pulling on the pile of spare clothes I’d left on the floor after the trip to A&E.

“I’m just tired, Jude.”
Tired
was an understatement. I hadn’t slept longer than two hours in the last three nights. “And I can’t see where this is heading. It’s hard enough now when it’s just the two of us. I don’t want to be your wife-in-every-port stuck at home with a kid and a raging case of postnatal depression while you’re getting shot at in every hellhole this side of the equator.”

“Recent events kind of imply I’m in more danger in my own apartment,” Judah said, and then winced as he saw my face. “Sorry, that was an asshole thing to say. It was an accident, I know that.”

I swung my still-damp coat round my shoulders and picked up my bag.

“ ’Bye, Judah.”

“ ’Bye? What do you mean, ’bye?”

“Whatever you want.”

“What I
want
is for you to stop acting like a goddamn drama queen and move into my flat. I love you, Lo!”

The words hit me like a slap. I stopped in the doorway, feeling the weight of my tiredness like something physical around my neck, pulling me down.

Hands in pale latex, the sound of a laugh . . .

“Lo?” Judah said uncertainly.

“I can’t do this,” I said, my face to the hallway. I was not sure what I was talking about—I can’t leave; I can’t stay; I can’t have this conversation, this life, this everything. “I just— I have to go.”

“So that job,” he said, the beginnings of anger in his voice. “The one I turned down. Are you saying I was wrong?”

“I never asked you to do that,” I said. My voice was shaking. “I never asked you. So don’t you put that on me.” I hoisted my bag up onto my shoulder and turned to the door.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t try to stop me. I walked out of the flat reeling like I was half-drunk. It was only when I got on the tube that the reality of what had just happened hit me.

- CHAPTER 5 -

I
love ports. I love the smell of tar and sea air, and the scream of the gulls. Maybe it’s years of taking the ferry to France for summer holidays, but a harbor gives me a feeling of freedom
in a way that an airport never does. Airports say
work
and
security checks
and
delays
. Ports say . . . I don’t know. Something completely different.
Escape
, maybe.

I had spent the train journey avoiding thoughts of Judah and trying to distract myself with research on the trip ahead. Richard Bullmer was only a few years older than me, but his CV was enough to make me feel hopelessly inadequate—a list of businesses and directorships that made my eyes water, each a stepping-stone to an even higher level of money and influence.

When I brought up
Wikipedia
on my phone, it showed a bronzed, handsome man with very black hair, arm in arm with a stunningly beautiful blonde in her late twenties.
Richard Bullmer with his wife, the heiress Anne Lyngstad, at their wedding in Stavanger,
read the caption.

Given his title, I’d assumed that his wealth had been handed to him on a plate, but it looked, from
Wikipedia
at least, as if I’d been unfair. The early part of the picture was cushy enough—prep school, Eton and Balliol. However, in his first year at university his father had died—his mother seemed already to be out of the picture, it wasn’t entirely clear—and the family estate had been swallowed up in death duty and debts, leaving him, at nineteen years of age, homeless and alone.

Under those circumstances, the fact that he got through Oxford with a degree would have been achievement enough, but he had also created a dot-com start-up in his third year. Its stock market flotation in 2003 was the first in his string of successes, culminating with this boutique ten-cabin cruise liner conceived as a super-luxury retreat for hopping the Scandinavian coastline.

Available for the wedding of your dreams, a dazzling corporate event to woo your clients with the “wow” factor, or simply for an exclusive holiday you and your family will never forget
, I read from the press pack as the train hurtled north, before turning to a floor plan of the cabin deck. There were four large suites in the nose of the boat—the prow, I supposed you’d call it, and a separate section with six smaller cabins arranged in a horseshoe shape at the back. Each cabin was numbered, odd and even on either side of a central corridor, with cabin 1 right in the tip of the prow, and cabins 9 and 10 adjoining each other in the curved stern of the boat. I guessed I’d be in one of the smaller cabins—presumably the suites were reserved for VIPs. There were no measurements on the floor plan and I frowned, remembering some of the cross-channel ferries I’d been on, the claustrophobic, windowless little rooms. The thought of spending five days in one of those wasn’t a comfortable one, but surely on a boat like this, we’d be talking something considerably more spacious?

I turned the page again, hoping to find a photo of one of the cabins to reassure myself, but instead I was confronted with a shot of a dazzling array of Scandinavian delicacies spread out on a white cloth. The chef on the
Aurora
had trained at Noma and elBulli, apparently. I yawned and pressed my hands into my eyes, feeling the grit of tiredness and the weight of everything from last night pressing down on me once again.

Judah’s face as I’d left him, stitched up with the blow from the night before, came into my head and I flinched. I wasn’t even sure what had happened. Had Judah and I broken up? Had I dumped him? Every time I tried to reconstruct the conversation, my exhausted brain took over, adding in stuff I hadn’t said, the responses I wished I’d made, making Judah more clueless and more insulting, to justify my own position, or alternatively more unconditionally loving, to try to convince myself this was all going to be okay. I hadn’t
asked
him to turn down the job. So why was I suddenly expected to be grateful for it?

I
dozed off for about thirty painful minutes in the car from the station to the port, and when the car driver’s cheerful announcement broke into my sleep it was like a splash of cold water to the face. I stumbled out of the car into the searing sunshine and the salt-sting of the breeze, feeling bleary and dazed.

The driver had dropped me off almost at the end of the gangway, but as I looked across the steel bridge to the boat, I couldn’t quite believe we were in the right place. The pictures from the brochure were familiar—huge glass windows reflecting the sun without a single fingerprint or speck of salt water, and gleaming white paint so fresh that it could have been finished that morning. But what had been missing from the brochure photos was a sense of scale. The
Aurora
was so
small
—more like a large yacht than a small cruise liner.
Boutique
had been the phrase in the press pack—and now I saw what they meant. I’d seen bigger boats hopping around the Greek islands. It seemed impossible that everything mentioned in the brochure—library, sunroom, spa, sauna, cocktail lounge, and all the other things apparently indispensable to the
Aurora
’s pampered passengers—could fit into this miniature vessel. Its size, along with the perfection of its paintwork, gave it a curiously toylike quality, and as I stepped onto the narrow steel gangway I had a sudden disorienting image of the
Aurora
as a ship imprisoned in a bottle—tiny, perfect, isolated, and unreal—and of myself, shrinking down to match it with every step I took towards the boat. It was a strange feeling, as if I were looking down the wrong end of a telescope, and it gave me a dizzying sensation almost like vertigo.

The gangway shifted beneath my feet, the oily, inky waters of the harbor swirling and sucking beneath, and I had a momentary illusion that I was falling, the steel beneath my feet giving way. I shut my eyes and gripped the cold metal rail.

Then I heard a woman’s voice from up ahead.

“It’s a wonderful smell, isn’t it!”

I blinked. A stewardess was standing in the entrance to the ship. She was bright, almost white blond, with tanned walnut-brown skin, and beaming as if I were her rich, long-lost relative from Australia. I took a breath, trying to steady myself, and then made my way across the rest of the gangway and onto the
Aurora Borealis
.

“Welcome, Miss Blacklock,” the stewardess said as I entered. Her accent was slightly clipped in a way I couldn’t place, and her words somehow managed to convey the impression that encountering me was a life experience on a par winning the lottery. “I am so
very
pleased to welcome you on board. Can one of our porters take your case?”

I looked around me, trying to work out how she knew who I was. My bag was gone before I could protest.

“Can I offer you a glass of champagne?”

“Um,” I said, distinguishing myself with witty repartee. The stewardess took that for yes and I found myself accepting the dewy flute she put into my hand. “Uh, thanks.”

The interior of the
Aurora
was gobsmacking. The boat might be small, but they had crammed in enough bling for a vessel ten times the size. The gangway doors opened up onto the landing of a long, curving staircase and literally every surface that could be French polished, encased in marble, or draped with raw silk had been so. The whole flight was illuminated by an eye-watering chandelier, suffusing the place with tiny splashes of light that reminded me of nothing so much as the sun glinting off the sea on a summer’s day. It was slightly nauseating—not in a social-conscience sort of way, although if you thought about it too hard, that too. But more the disorientation—the way the crystals acted like a prism on every drop of light, dazzling you, throwing you off-balance with a sensation like peering into a child’s kaleidoscope. The effect, combined with lack of sleep, was not completely pleasant.

The stewardess must have seen me gawping, because she gave a proud smile.

“The Great Stairway is really something, isn’t it?” she said. “That one chandelier has more than two thousand Swarovski crystals.”

“Gosh,” I said faintly. My head throbbed and I tried to remember if I’d packed the ibuprofen. It was hard not to blink.

“We are
very
proud of the
Aurora
,” the stewardess continued warmly. “My name is Camilla Lidman and I am in charge of hospitality on the vessel. My office is on the lower deck, and if there is
anything
I can do to make your stay with us more enjoyable
please
do not hesitate to ask. My colleague Josef”—she indicated a smiling blond man to her right—“will show you to your cabin and give you a tour of the facilities. Dinner is at eight, but we would invite you to join us at seven p.m. in the Lindgren Lounge for a presentation on the boat’s facilities and the wonders you can expect to enjoy on this cruise of the famous Norwegian fjords and the Swedish archipelago islands. Ah! Mr. Lederer.”

A tall dark man in his forties was coming up the gangway behind us, followed by a porter struggling with a huge suitcase.

“Please be careful,” he said, wincing visibly as the porter bumped the trolley over a joint in the gangway. “That case has some very delicate equipment in it.”

“Mr. Lederer,” Camilla Lidman said, with the exact same amount of near-delirious enthusiasm she had injected into her welcome to me. I had to hand it to her; I was impressed at her acting skills, though in the case of Mr. Lederer it probably took less effort since he was kind of easy on the eye. “Let me welcome you aboard the
Aurora
. Can I offer you a glass of champagne? And Mrs. Lederer?”

“Mrs. Lederer won’t be coming,” Mr. Lederer said. He ran a hand through his hair and glanced up at the Swarovski chandelier with an air of slight bemusement.

“Oh, I am so sorry.” Camilla Lidman’s flawless brow puckered in a frown of concern. “I hope nothing is wrong.”

“Well, she’s in fine health,” Mr. Lederer said. “In fact, she’s fucking my best friend.” He smiled and took the champagne.

Camilla blinked and then said smoothly, almost without pause, “Josef, please do take Miss Blacklock to her cabin.”

Josef gave a little half bow and extended a hand towards the downward sweep of the staircase.

“This way, please?” he said.

I nodded dumbly and allowed myself to be ushered away, still clutching my glass of champagne. Over my shoulder I could hear Camilla telling Mr. Lederer about her office on the lower deck.

“You are in cabin nine, the Linnaeus Suite,” Josef told me as I followed him down into the beige dimness of a thickly carpeted, windowless corridor. “All the cabins are named after notable Scandinavian scientists.”

“Who gets the Nobel?” I cracked nervously. The corridor was giving me a strange, stifled feeling, a heavy weight of claustrophobia on the back of my neck. It wasn’t just the size but the soporifically low lamps and lack of natural light.

Josef answered seriously.

“On this particular voyage, the Nobel Suite will be occupied by Lord and Lady Bullmer. Lord Bullmer is director of the Northern Lights Company, which owns the vessel. There are ten cabins,” he told me as we descended a set of stairs. “Four forward and six aft, all on the middle deck. Each cabin consists of a suite of up to three rooms, with its own bathroom, featuring full-sized bath and separate shower, full-sized double bed, and private veranda. The Nobel Suite has a private hot tub.”

Veranda? Somehow the idea of having a veranda on a cruise ship seemed completely wrong, but I supposed, thinking about it, it wasn’t any weirder than having any other open-deck area. Hot tub—well, least said about that the better.

“Every cabin has a named steward to assist you, day or night. Your stewards will be myself and my colleague Karla, who you will be meeting later this evening. We will be delighted to help you in any way we can during your stay on the
Aurora
.”

“So this is the middle deck, right?” I asked. Josef nodded.

“Yes, this deck is solely passenger suites. Upstairs you will find the dining room, spa, lounge, library, sundeck, and other public areas. All are named after Scandinavian writers—the Lindgren Lounge, the Jansson Dining Room, and so on.”

“Jansson?”

“Tove,” he supplied.

“Oh, of course. Moomins,” I said stupidly. God my head was aching.

We had reached a paneled wooden door with a discreet plaque reading
9. LINNAEUS
. Josef threw open the door and stood back to allow me to step inside.

The place was, by no stretch of exaggeration, about seven or eight times nicer than my flat at home, and not a great deal smaller, either. Mirrored wardrobes stretched away to my right, and in the center, flanked by a sofa to one side and a dressing table to the other, was a huge double bed, the white linen expanse invitingly smooth and crisp.

But the thing that made the biggest impression on me was not the space—which was impressive—but the light. Coming out of the narrow, artificially lit corridor, the light streaming in from the huge veranda doors opposite was blinding. Sheer white curtains waved in the breeze and I saw that the sliding door was open. I felt an instant sense of relief, as if a tightness in my chest had lifted.

“The doors can be latched back,” Josef explained from behind me, “but the catch will automatically disengage in the event of adverse weather conditions.”

“Oh, great,” I said vaguely, but all I could think of was how much I wanted Josef to
go,
so I could flop down on the bed and sink into oblivion.

Instead, I stood awkwardly, suppressing my yawns, while Josef told me unnecessarily about the functions of the bathroom (yes, I had used one before, thank you), the fridge and minibar (all complimentary—unfortunately for my liver), and explained that the ice would be refreshed twice a day and I could ring for him or Karla at
any
time.

At last my drooping yawns were no longer ignorable, and he gave a little half bow and excused himself, leaving me to take in the cabin.