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the coast slide past, the oil refinery at Fawley, the Isle of Wight away to the left, which was, Dee pointed out to Paula, ‘port’.
    ‘What’s port? The port’s what we’ve just left.’
    ‘That’s right.
Left
is
port
.’ Dee laughed. It seemed absurd. Paula laughed too, perhaps at the sight of her mother laughing. ‘On a ship,’ Dee explained, ‘you
leave
the port, and
left
is port. Maybe that’s how you can remember. Left is port and right is “starboard”.’
    ‘Starboard’s silly,’ Paula said bluntly. The engines drummed beneath their feet, a percussion that was to accompany their very existence throughout the voyage. The water slipped past like oil and their whole world shifted very slightly, as though to remind them that nothing was secure from now on.
    ‘Where are the waves?’
    ‘The waves will come.’
    The waves came. The ship passed through the narrows between Hurst Castle and Sconce Point, out of the Solent and into the Channel, and the waves came. The vessel began to pitch into the water, shuddering slightly at each impact, like a genteel lady at some repeated solecism. The Needleswere away to port. There was a breath of spray in the air. ‘It’s lovely, Mummy!’ cried Paula; while Dee felt the tremor of the ship transfer itself organically to her stomach, and quite suddenly the excitement was not so wonderful, the day not so thrilling, the sensation of guilt at the idea of Tom, abandoned in his prep school, not so acute. Quite suddenly what mattered was the feeling of nausea that spread from her abdomen throughout the channels of her body to her joints.
    The subsequent two days were spent in a kind of limbo, confined to the cabin for hours on end, relieved with occasional walks along the promenade deck and rare visits to the dining saloon for toast and tea and mashed potato, which were Binty’s recommendation for treating seasickness. Binty and Douglas she already knew vaguely, but it was inevitable that now they would become close friends. Acquaintances became friends quickly in this world of enforced company. Binty was small and vivacious and Douglas was tall enough to make the matter of their physical coupling seem a bit of a mystery. ‘Laurel and Hardy’ was what Edward called them, which wasn’t fair because Binty was quite pretty and hadn’t got a moustache, and Douglas was anything but lugubrious – rather a dry wit in fact. There were others on board, the Powells, and a meek little man called Nissing, and Marjorie Onslow. Marjorie was large and jolly, and she mothered everyone. She mothered Paula and Dee, she mothered Binty and she would have mothered Jennifer Powell if she had been allowed; she was going to mother soldiers and airmen because she worked for SSAFA, the Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Airmen’s Families Association, whose role was to mother those who were far from home. She claimed that an ancestor of hers had given his name to Onslow Gardens. ‘I thought that was the Earl of Onslow,’ said Jennifer,who knew that kind of thing. Marjorie rolled her eyes. ‘My lips are sealed.’
    ‘I don’t expect they’re alone in that,’ Jennifer said. Her husband was a colonel on the Governor’s staff in Cyprus, a man who seemed to be constructed out of mahogany and patent leather, buffed and polished until he shone. Jennifer possessed a kind of superior vulgarity that Dee had never before encountered. She was a large woman within the boundaries of whose body you could glimpse the outline of a once slender young girl. She described herself in equine terms. ‘Once upon a time I was a pretty foal, then a fairly successful hunter and later a good brood mare. Now I’m afraid I’m just a hack: a safe ride, but no longer very exciting.’
    Nissing was in the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works. ‘Works and Bricks, are you?’ Jennifer said. ‘Should think so with a name like that. Call you Hut, do they?’
    The man smiled. He’d learned to smile. It was a full two