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Overview
When her missionary father suddenly dies in Nigeria, thirty-seven-year old school teacher Anne Harrington makes the journey from London to retrieve his body. She decides to take the return voyage by container ship, giving herself time to come to terms with his death.
She had no way of knowing what would await her onboard: that she would get involved with two stowaways (clandestinely), and the ship’s mate (sexually), and the journey would end in murder. Nor, for that matter, that reading her father’s diaries would reveal an illegitimate sibling, whose fate her father was seeking when he died and whom Anne must now attempt to find in order to make peace with herself.
In The Voyage Home, Jane Rogers explores the themes of immigration and colonialism in “a lusciously written tale, rich in emotional nuance” (Publishers Weekly).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781468307795 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 847 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
STEPPING ONTO THE SHIP, Anne feels a wave of relief. In fact she feels — imagines she feels, because how could it be true on a ship the size of a tower block, tethered in the flat oily filth of the harbour? — imagines she feels the iron deck rise a little, like a tiny indrawn breath, to meet her falling foot. Imagines she feels the movement of the sea, after the stillness of the land. Imagines, as she imagines the sea lifts her, that it will be all right.
Her cabin is above deck, as promised, but inside it's strangely dark — a reddish gloom, light through a closed eyelid. When the steward has put down her cases and unnecessarily pointed out the shower, Anne hands him the folded 1000-naira note she's been clutching in her pocket, and shuts the door after him. Why is the room so dark? The window seems to be blocked by something; she stares out and realises it is the red side of a container, no more than twelve inches from her window. By craning her neck right back she can just glimpse a crack of sky above it. Perhaps they'll move it, maybe it's waiting to be stored below. There's an odd smell, cleaning fluid and disinfectant covering something else — something that sticks unpleasantly at the back of her throat. She runs her fingers around the window frame looking for a way to open it, but there's none.
The cabin has twin beds with matching flowery covers, big ugly round flowers like cartwheels, in turquoise and deeper blue. An anonymous room, with practical grey fleck carpet, and a framed picture of a sailing ship on an implausibly blue sea hanging over the bed she chooses, the one in the corner away from the bathroom.
Anne stows Father's case in the wardrobe, and opens up her own. There are two plastic bags of dirty washing. She felt awkward about letting the houseboy do it, and couldn't do it herself because of the houseboy. But there must be a laundry room on board.
Not yet. She sits on the bed, empty hands on her knees. Her instinct is to go straight out on deck, out of the artificially lit dimness of this cabin — but things are still being loaded, she can hear the shouts of men — the sailors, the dockers. She might be in the way on deck, they might stare at her. Better to wait here until they sail. Anne suddenly visualises the crowded rails of a passenger ship, tiny figures leaning over to shout and wave goodbye, the answering calls and waves from the shore, the blue sea widening between them. There is no one here to wave her off.
She swivels round and swings her legs up onto the bed, leaning back against the wall. The stopping, being at the end of the list of things to do, is bewildering. Since she left home — since the morning of Matthew Afigbo's phone call whenever it was, ten days ago — things that must be done have made stepping stones. She had to fly to Lagos, had to bury Father, had to clear his things; the past three days have been consumed entirely in begging and bribing her way onto this ship. To reach this empty space.
The only time she's cried has been out of sheer weariness and frustration when the big uniformed man told her the body must be sent home for burial, burial of a British tourist in Nigeria not being permitted. But he wasn't a tourist, she argued.
'He came here about a church exchange — and he worked here before, he worked here for ten years —'
The big man shook his head. 'Tourist visa. Your passport?' He stared at her photo then looked at her suspiciously. 'You were born in Nigeria? You live in UK?'
'Yes, that's what I'm saying, my father worked here years ago ...'
Sweat glistened in the rolls of the official's neck above his khaki collar, and the little fan on his desk made slow eddies in the hot thick air. A part of her brain observed that its whirring motor was generating heat of its own which its spinning blades struggled to dispel; its functions cancelled one another out, leaving only the by-product noise. The fat man shook his head, the interview was over. When she got out of the room, hunching her shoulders and sliding her hands into her pockets, she touched the roll of notes Matthew had made her count out — the bribe she should have offered. And tears rose to her eyes.
Matthew had sorted it out; requesting an interview the following morning, wearing his dog collar and neat black suit, delicately placing the cash on the edge of the big man's desk as they sat down; nodding to Anne to hand over her father's passport, although she knew there could be no official reason on earth why she must surrender Father's passport to this pig.
She can't sit in this strangely smelling darkened room all day. It's hot everywhere — of course — but at least out there there may be a breath of wind, or a hint of coolness off the water. She takes Father's case out of the wardrobe again, and removes the faded blue cloth-bound book on which he has printed NIGERIA. She found it on his bedside table, among his sparse belongings in Matthew's guest room. It's old — dating from her parents' arrival in Nigeria, before she was even born. It will tell her, perhaps, what neither of them would ever tell: what happened there to smash the idyll of her early years. His elegant flowing script fills the pages, the same utterly distinctive writing he has been sending her in his fortnightly letters ever since she left home. Writing she still considers grown-up, formed, in contrast to her own rounded primary-teacher script. It is as familiar as his speaking voice. She could no more leave it unread than put the phone down on him.
Taking the old diary and Father's hat she braves the deck, turning left to head for the rail on the side away from the dock. She threads her way between containers, expecting any moment to be turned back or forbidden, but there's no one here. Between the last container and the rail she finds a space a couple of yards wide, shaded by the container. The rumble of the crane, and dockers' shouts and cries, are all away behind her. She leans on the rail. Every kind of rubbish floats on the oily water; she stands staring down at it blankly, nostrils wrinkling at the smell, both more disgusting and more reassuringly real than that inside the cabin. She is suspended until the ship moves; it is no-time, like waiting in an airport.
Coming here hasn't helped anyone. Matthew could have buried Father more efficiently without her, could have bundled up the books and papers and air-freighted his case back to England. She could have taught the last week of term, and been there for the Christmas play. And she has taken up Matthew's time and worried him with her decision to go home by boat.
'It's a long time at sea, Anne. You'll be lonely. It would be better to get back to your routine.'
She couldn't explain to him that she needs to be lonely, she needs to be outside her routine, she needs to find out what she feels. If Father has really gone (of course he's gone, she tells herself furiously. You think he's going to ring and say it's a mistake?) then what will her life be like?
It is childish and ridiculous, of course she has a life of her own, work, friends, her house; her routine, as Matthew says, to turn to for comfort. But now there must be a space. She recognises the impulse to go by sea as somehow connected to the stubbornness Father has always filled her with. It isn't rational. The rudder is unseen, it steers down below the surface.
And it would have been impossible not to come. A man's child should be at his funeral, she thinks. But he doesn't know she was there, it's a fictional transaction; she must derive satisfaction from knowing that if he had been able to know she was there then he would have been pleased. From knowing she has done the right thing although nobody is there to see it. 'God sees.' Oh yeah. She still feels that hot smarting adolescent resentment at what he has instilled in her, the nasty little judging eye. Well, are You satisfied? I came to Lagos and buried him. It has been horrible. I've buried both of them now, OK?
Once the ship begins to move her life will begin.
'G'day.' A man has come around the container behind her; middle-aged, tall, a sheaf of papers in his hands — official. He extends a hand. 'Robbie Boyle. First mate.'
She tries to place his accent. South African? 'Hello. Anne Harrington. I'm a passenger.'
'I know.'
Of course. There are only three passengers, the retired couple and her. Every member of the crew will know. Will she be the only not-old woman, and all these men? She can feel heat spreading across her face and neck, suddenly imagines the crew going about their business, glancing up surreptitiously at the passengers coming aboard — then meeting each other's eyes and winking. They might run a sweepstake on how many of them can make it with a likely female, they might joke about her in their quarters at night ...
Why is she thinking this? She's thirty-seven, for god's sake. The first mate stands before her with a quizzical smile, she can feel him watching her traffic-light face. She turns quickly back to the rail, but he takes a step closer. There's an awful little silence and she can't stop herself glancing round to see what he's doing behind her. Copying onto his papers a number stamped on the container. Why's it taking so long? He is standing slightly too close. This is in her imagination. He speaks as he writes.
'There's more space on the upper deck — sun loungers and stuff up there.'
The questioning inflection gives him away. Australian. 'I'm sorry, shouldn't I be —'
'No, you can stay here, no worries. You've got the run of the ship pretty much — want me to give you a tour sometime?'
'Thank you.'
'OK. When we get under way.' He gives a quick nod, then he goes.
The man was simply being polite. Probably passengers are his responsibility. He'll think she is ridiculous. Why did she have to blush?
In the evening there's a meal where the captain welcomes them. They're still in dock — waiting, he says, for a tug to take them out. He's a small squat toad-shaped German with very precise English; he introduces four other officers, including the first mate she has met, and Mr and Mrs Malone, the other passengers.
Mrs Malone is tiny, with a fluffed-up halo of thinning pinky-red hair and circles of rouge on her soft wrinkled cheeks. She darts across to sit by Anne.
'We girls had better stick together here!' and Anne is assailed by the choking fumes of her hairspray, and then more gently enveloped by her flowery sweet scent. Mr Malone, tall and hunched, sits opposite. He has a gaunt, striking face with a long purple birthmark covering half his nose and his left cheek.
Mrs Malone talks. Words bubble from her lips as Anne eats; occasionally Anne turns her head to glance at her, at her animated little monkey-face with its strange crimson lips whose colouring has run along the little lines and wrinkles that radiate0ain stiffly nods, and her husband glares at Anne, and two of the officers conduct a subdued argument in German. First mate Robbie seems to raise his eyebrows and half smile at Anne, but she quickly looks away. Mrs Malone is talking about ships. Her husband adores ships. Cargo ships, of course, working ships, not those nasty great floating nightclubs for tourists with too much money. 'Six restaurants, gym and sauna, cinemas, why d'they go to sea at all?'
Anne nods distractedly, suddenly finding her chicken in lemon sauce inedible. They go on those big ships for anonymity, of course. How will she be able to avoid Ellie Malone? But Ellie is already turning her twinkling face to the captain.
'On a working ship they know how to look after their passengers, don't you, captain?'
He grimaces gallantly, and makes his escape when a vacant-looking youth in white begins to remove their dinner plates. Anne clutches her half- full plate for a moment then forces herself to let it go. You don't have to eat everything. You don't have to. But it is a bad omen.
'Always a treat getting to know real sailors,' Ellie confides to Anne. 'What they've not seen wouldn't fill the back of a postage stamp.'
Her cutlery gone, Anne has nothing to fiddle with, and struggles and fails to make sense of this remark or find any response at all to it. She gives Ellie a foolish smile.
'And Christmas — you'll have the best Christmas of your life on board, Anne, trust me. No cooking, no clearing up, no awkward relatives — and naval men, well, they do know how to celebrate, don't they Philip?'
Anne stares at Mr Malone who nods briefly and continues to pare slivers of cheese from the array on the board between them. These are not naval men, it's a commercial shipping line — but it doesn't matter. Christmas.
The word has conjured an image of Father in his freshly laundered surplice, standing in the pulpit at St Luke's. The vases either side of the altar are full of scarlet-berried holly and fat white chrysanthemums; all around the church the candles flicker and glow in the silence. It is the one service of his that she attends in the year. She watches the smile grow on his face as he stares at his congregation, watches his arms rise like angel's wings as if he would embrace the whole church, the whole world. 'Unto us a child is born. Let us give thanks.'
Her eyes suddenly sting and fill, but she can blink it back. A child is born. What did she think? That she would have a child before he died? Nonsense. Nonsense. It makes her furious. He was giving thanks for Baby Jesus, Anne. In his pretty little away-in-a-manger, while kindly shepherds washed their socks in the O little town of Bethlehem. There's only her now. No Father, no mother, no brother no sister. There's only her at the end of the line failing to extend it into the future.
He would have liked a grandchild, he would have baptised it and given thanks.
What sentimental tosh. He couldn't even be bothered with his own child at Christmas when she was little. She searches her childhood memory: there's one, can it have been their last Nigerian Christmas? Wasn't she too young then to remember? She can feel it, though, reaching out to the top of the prickly tree from the height of Father's shoulders, to balance a tiny doll up there, a doll whose frock matched hers — a doll Amoge made. After he and Mum split up she never even saw him at Christmas, not for years, and later it was only the ritual Boxing Day visit to her grandparents. Why imagine what he would have liked when it's you that wants, Anne, it's your eyes that fill up at 'unto us a child is born'. It's nothing to do with Father.
Christmas, its awful cloying power: church, Baby, family, her anger at her own inability always to reject the fraud of it and simply tell him she'd prefer to spend the week on her own. No, she would always be sucked into it, handing round mince pies to the choir, tearful in the church, smiling and raging at the false celebration and at her own lack of any other; able even less to escape once he retired, dragged back with him into the kindly cosy world of St Luke's and its bittersweet Christmas rituals.
No need now. No need now. She is on this ship to sail through Christmas like a circus dog through a paper hoop. There will be no Christmas, let Ellie twitter as much as she likes. Anne will spend Christmas staring at the sea.
There is nothing on the table she wants to eat or drink, already she knows she's a little giddy from the wine; she can haul herself to her feet, nod at Ellie Malone's smiley painted face and half raise her hand in farewell whilst turning, not looking to see if any of the officers are watching, to get herself out of the dining room. She's exhausted but it's all right; there's nothing to do, she's not accountable to anyone here. She is setting sail on her own. And there's an undertow, on which she's riding now, which is making her limbs weak and her eyes blurry, which is bearing her into oblivious sleep.
Anne wakes suddenly, to pitch darkness, head full of grinding noise. She thinks the cicadas have gone mad — turns to look through the window above Father's bed, where for the past nine nights she has lain watching the moving lights of planes coming into Lagos out of the thick dark sky — then realises she is on the ship.
The noise must be engines. She feels for the lamp switch and the room leaps into place. 01.58, says her clock. She pulls on clothes and sandals and quietly lets herself out of the cabin, making her way between the dark hulks of the containers towards the ship's rail. She can feel the vibration of the engines through her feet and has a flash again of that sudden excitement of stepping aboard. The ship is moving. And coming to the rail, suddenly the sea is open and silvered before her, covered in moonlight, with a cluster of yellow harbour lights on black falling away to the left. As her eyes adjust the misty moonlight seems brighter and brighter, shining over a sea of mercury, flooding the opaque sky with pale light. The boat seems to move very fast, charging through the water, the shore lights dropping away even as she watches. Ahead is nothing but emptiness, a flat silvery plain.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Voyage Home"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Jane Rogers.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Also by Jane Rogers,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Part I,
Part II,
Part III,
Acknowledgements,