Free The Hope by James Lovegrove Page B

would be kindly and pleasurable and honest … if she was allowed to stay. She dared not ask, in case a refusal came, like a sentence of death.
    Breakfast smelled wonderful and tasted better. Angel cleared her tray in five minutes while Lucius sat beside her on the bed offering to help her out should she get stuck. There was tea in a fluted bone china pot (Angel poured it gingerly, frightened it might shatter in her hands, those same hands that…) and there was bread still warm from the ship’s bakery, and there was, miracle of miracles, fresh fruit grown in one of the greenhouses. But with each heavenly mouthful Angel became more and more nervous that this was her final meal here, a parting gift.
    Gabrielle removed the tray and Angel thanked her, believing she could never thank her enough. The older woman looked tired and Angel would not have been surprised if she had not slept once during the past four days, keeping vigil over a complete stranger.
    “Please,” Angel said, “you must have a rest. I feel fine. I’ll get up and you have the bed. I’m fine. No really.” In the end Gabrielle relented and lay down (“Just for a little while”) and fell asleep with the cat lying fitted into the curve of her body. Angel, wrapped in a crimson silk dressing gown, paced about the cabin for a while, feeling lightheaded, then sat in the armchair and picked up the woman’s book. It was called Jane Eyre and Angel, having read the first few pages, decided she didn’t have a clue what was going on and nodded off.
     
    “You must think I’m absurdly old-fashioned, enjoying the dances like that.”
    “No, I don’t. I like it. It looks nice.”
    “It’s terribly difficult, you know. You can’t just go out there and whoosh about with a strange man without knowing all the movements, steps and patterns. Oh! To listen to me you’d think it was maths or geometry or something, and it’s really nothing of the sort. But it needs more than knowledge alone. Any idiot can learn a few steps by rote just as any idiot can learn a times table. Well, except me perhaps!” She laughed a generous, self-deprecating laugh. “To dance well, you need much more. You need…” Her smile became apologetic.
    “You need to love it?” Angel suggested.
    “Yes. I can’t think of any other way to put it.”
    It was afternoon, following a morning spent asleep and a lunchtime spent by Angel on tenterhooks, as she dreaded the blow that must fall eventually – “You have to go now.” It had not fallen, yet, and when it did, she was sure it would come in the kindest, gentlest manner possible.
    Gabrielle and she chatted like old friends about their disparate lives, a lot about the injustice of the way of the Hope , a little about life on the land. This last was a bizarre fantasy to Angel and a subject Gabrielle seemed uneasy about, as did most old folk. She said she vaguely remembered embarking, but it was about thirty years ago.
    “One thing I remember well. There was a ticker-tape parade, thousands of bits of paper dropped from the very top of the ship down on to the passengers and the people on the quay as they were waving goodbye. They used black paper, which was unusual, but très chic . I thought it looked more like a shower of ashes. The whole thing was terribly unusual. It didn’t feel like a time for celebration. I felt that the whole ceremony was for me and for me alone, private and not particularly joyful. When I’ve mentioned this to other people, they agree and say they felt the same. It’s hard to know why. Perhaps it’s best not to talk about it.”
    As the day wore on, Angel relaxed slightly. Perhaps if she kept talking long enough, she might be allowed to spend just one more night.
    “Why did you give up dancing?” she ventured.
    Gabrielle scratched the top of Lucius’s head and looked puzzled, not as if the question was unexpected but as if she had been asking herself the same thing every day and had not reached the answer,