Uncertain Voyage Read online

  A Fawcett Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1967 by Dorothy Gilman Butters

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday & Company in 1967.

  FAWCETT is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Lines from “renascence” from COLLECTED POEMS by Edna St Vincent Millay. Reprinted by permission of Norma Millay Ellis.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  ISBN 9780449216286

  Ebook ISBN 9780593159576

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Dedication

  By Dorothy Gilman

  About the Author

  1

  The ship had been five days at sea, and now Melissa could feel tension rising in her at thought of their arrival the next morning in Cherbourg and a few hours later at Southampton; for on the following day, Sunday, they would reach Bremerhaven, Germany, and there she would be abandoned, rendered up to a huge and totally new continent—a crocodile with open jaws—where not a friend or acquaintance, not even a name scrawled on a slip of paper, would be available to her for the next fourteen days. It felt to her like a great void into which she must disappear, and even if she emerged from it unscathed a century later her intelligence grasped the fact that she could never emerge unchanged. All that she carried with her was herself—whoever and whatever that might be—and the two sheets of white paper upon which her travel agent had typed a complicated list of dates, names of hotels, and plane and train departures. It was not enough; she was terrified, and at times the terror rose in her like vomit.

  “Yes, hello, how are you?” she called out, smiling, as she passed the Fergusons who occupied deck chairs next to hers on sunny days. Self-consciously she quickened her stride, walking more purposefully so that no one would guess her growing subterranean panic.

  She had been nearly as frightened when she boarded the ship in New York, but with the difference that at any moment before the ship sailed she could change her mind, turn and leave, run home to safety and to Dr. Szym. Now there was no turning back, for an ocean lay between her and home, and while it crossed her mind that she could disembark in Bremerhaven and ask for an immediate flight back to New York, she knew that she had neither the courage nor the experience even to grapple with a change of those authoritative black words in her itinerary. She felt powerless to change anything, and least of all the brief flare of braveness that had brought her here despite her terror. Surely, she thought, Dr. Szym would not have allowed her to come if there was danger of her cracking?

  She reached A deck and pushed open the door against the wind. The sun was shining but there were no bikinis today; people huddled under blankets in chairs, their heads wrapped in bizarre, makeshift coverings—newspapers, shawls, scarfs—so that they had the look of convalescents placed under the sun by attendants. Melissa reached the railing and clung to it, bracing her body against the wind. Below, the sea boiled gray and white against the prow of the ship. To the left and to the right stretched the limitless space of the ocean, constantly, eternally streaming past in its steady course toward infinity. It was the first time that she had crossed an ocean, and its unbounded space continued to grip her with a strange excitement, the ship feeling a small, man-made intrusion upon its surface, a microcosm daring to cross the unsteady floor of the world.

  She turned to look at the people around her and instinctively her glance sought out the couples, the higgledy-piggledy mismatched people whom she had watched in wonder since the ship left New York. There was this constant procession of life aboard ship that she could not quite capture for herself because she was alone; because almost everyone else had someone—they had each other—and there had been no one with whom she could become a pair. She had hoped there might be. She could not mourn her marriage, which had ended irrevocably a month ago, but what she longed for, she knew wistfully, was the appearance of that man she ought to have married, the man who would have been waiting for her if she had not eloped at sixteen out of a desperate need to attach herself to life.

  Across the deck, leaning against the side rail, she saw the man called Stearns puffing on his pipe and staring out to sea. Of the six people assigned to table 43 in the dining room he was the only one who did not enter into conversation or mingle with the others and she wondered about him because he also traveled alone. He gave no evidence of need. He appeared utterly self-sustaining, calm and deliberate, yet Melissa had begun to picture everyone whom she met as joined to others by invisible strings of dependency that kept them upright, smiling, and stable. Her own cords had been severed, leaving her no one, and out of this had come this vision of threads running from each person to unseen mothers, fathers, lovers, sisters, brothers, and friends, giving them nourishment and security like secret umbilical cords. Surely even this man Stearns depended upon someone, she reflected; in everyone’s life there had to be someone, didn’t there?

  She glanced at her watch and noted with a sense of deep relief that it was nearing half-past seven, the dinner hour. There was just time to shower and change into her most attractive new dress, and she turned and fought her way back to the door, her melancholy lifting at the thought of something concrete to do.

  * * *

  —

  But it was different tonight, already change was invading the long dining table, which until now had been a mainstay for Melissa and the high point of each day. The college students, whose wit enlivened each meal, were to disembark in the morning and they had brought centimes and francs to the table to discuss and memorize. Melissa realized with a pang that tomorrow night they would be spending these same coins in Paris. Already they were looking forward, they were no longer immersed in the present to which Melissa had to cling for the sake of sanity. It was true that twenty-four hours from now she would still be seated at this same table but she would be entirely alone, the sole survivor of two ports of call. And beyond that—to the possibility of leaving this ship—she dared not think; it was like trying to envision a landing on the moon, too remote, too unreal even to consider.

  Four of them arose from their dessert and with gay remarks went off to their evening, leaving only the man Stearns seated at the opposite end of the table. Melissa lit a cigarette, determined to linger over coffee no matter what inconvenience to the waiters or to Stearns. It looked a long evening ahead and she could sense the imminence of a left-out-of-life feeling.

  Stearns suddenly turned his head and looked at her. He said, “I heard you say that you are going to visit Majorca.”

  She nodded. “Yes. I go first to Copenhagen for a few days, and then Paris and
then to Majorca.”

  “To Palma?” When she nodded again he said, “When?” He seemed very serious.

  “About the eleventh, I think; the eleventh of July. It’s the last stop before I fly home on the fifteenth. Are you going there, too?” she asked curiously.

  He crushed his cigarette into the ashtray. “I wonder if you would meet me on A deck later, say at ten o’clock. There is something I should like to ask of you. It’s rather important. Would you mind?”

  She looked at him in astonishment. He had scarcely spoken to her before, and perhaps because of this she had labeled him dull. Now he wanted her to meet him on A deck. She blushed. She had not been aware of any overt admiration on his part except—now that she thought of it—she had noticed him once or twice studying her appraisingly. He had said very little at meals, in fact he had seemed to her a complete cipher as a personality; but his invitation made him at once mysterious and possible. “Why not?” she said charmingly, with an expressive little shrug of her shoulders.

  “Good—thank you,” he said, and with a nod excused himself and left the table.

  “Well! I have an assignation,” she thought brightly, and she felt intrigued, happy, lighter. When she thought about the man she remembered that his eyes were a very pleasing shade of blue although it was a pity his cheeks were pitted with the scars of acne or smallpox. He could not be more than forty. “Oh damn,” she thought suddenly, “I’m making images again, he’ll be Prince Charming himself before ten o’clock arrives.” It was what she had done with Charles, she knew now; she had needed him, and so deeply that she had ruthlessly fitted him into a pre-conceived image and then spent the years of their marriage burying Truth to preserve Illusion.

  “But—well, really, anything can happen!” she thought delightedly, and enlarging on this, she imagined Stearns telling her that he had fallen madly in love with her: There is a quality about you, he would say in a bemused voice. I have met other women more beautiful, but there is something so real, so genuine about you. That would be nice, she thought, she would like to be real. Then he would of course apologize for being so impulsive but he would point out that if he did not speak now he would never see her again—he too was to disembark at Cherbourg, she remembered. It was her address that he wanted (“there is something I should like to ask of you”) so that he could find her again when they both returned to America. She thought solemnly, “Doctor Szym was quite right, it can be a wonderful world if one is open to new experiences and not afraid!”

  She finished her coffee—it was nearly nine—and withdrew to the writing room to address a few cards. Then she returned to her cabin to powder her nose and put on her trench coat. Very dimly from this distance she could hear the sounds of the orchestra in the ball room and she thought, drawing a new mouth with lipstick, “Perhaps he will ask me to dance. He may even kiss me.” A feeling of deep excitement filled her. It was possible that now, at last, her life might begin, and snatching up her cigarettes and purse she hurried out and up the stairs.

  There had been a withdrawal of light from A deck but the wind was still blowing hard, the seas running high and fast past the ship. The sky was gray—it was only twilight on the ocean—with clouds of leaden charcoal skidding across the sky, leaving wisps like smoke behind them. Yet perversely there was one star twinkling among the clouds, one bright solitary little star that looked so friendly it caught at Melissa’s heart, for she longed quite desperately to shine with just such brightness in her loneliness. It was what she must—had to—achieve, it was the whole purpose of her trip. Leaning against the rail she closed her eyes and like a child whispered, “Star light star bright first star I’ve seen tonight, wish I may, wish I might…”

  She felt the man come and stand beside her. Opening her eyes she turned and said lightly, “Good evening!”

  He said quickly, almost breathlessly, “I won’t take but a moment of your time—”

  “But I have lots of time,” she told him with a little laugh.

  “I haven’t,” he said, and so bruskly that she stiffened. “I want to ask if you will deliver a package for me in Majorca, it’s imperative that it be there before the fifteenth.”

  Deliver a package for him…There was dancing downstairs and he wanted her to deliver a package…She felt a wave of disillusionment overwhelm and defeat her so that for a moment she and the depressed sky became one. “You want what?” she asked incredulously.

  “It’s an imposition, I know, but it’s terribly important. Can you do it?”

  She shivered. He would never know how chilled, how rejected and rebuffed she felt. It was really vicious of him to make a useful object of her when she had anticipated so much from him. She wondered bitterly when she would stop believing in Santa Claus. “I suppose I could,” she told him coldly.

  “It’s an extremely valuable package,” he said, and turned to look into her face as if to impress this fact upon her.

  “Very large?” she asked, to preserve the amenities and to prove both her civility and her practical sense. Nevertheless she did not like him; she could not forgive him.

  “Quite small. It’s a book.” Glancing first behind him, he brought from his trench coat a thin flat package wrapped in plain white paper and tied with string.

  “A book,” she repeated dully, and then, suspiciously, “How do I know it’s not heroin or something illegal?”

  “You may open it if you like,” he said. “The place to which you deliver it—do you mind memorizing it?—is a small shop in downtown Palma. Its name is the Anglo-Majorcan Export Company.”

  “Anglo-Majorcan Export Company,” she echoed indifferently, and thrust the package into her pocket.

  “The address is more difficult. Number 11, Plaza Veri Rosario.”

  “Number 11, Plaza Veri Rosario.”

  “You must tell them the key to what they want is on page 191. There is a message, too: tell them George is very sick. Look here,” he added suddenly, “there may be people after this. People who will try to take it from you if they put two and two together, if they learn for instance that you also go to Majorca, and that we sat at the same table.”

  “People?” she asked with a frown. “What kind of people?”

  “I am forced to tell you. They will be enemy agents.”

  She stared at him incredulously, her attention diverted at last. “Are you serious?” she demanded. When he nodded she said, “But how impossibly melodramatic. Who are you? And why me?”

  He said simply, “It doesn’t matter who I am, except that I’m beginning to suspect that I’ll not get through to Majorca.”

  The bleakness of his statement impinged upon her fantasies. Something almost like compassion touched her and she gasped. “But you mustn’t think that.”

  He gave a short laugh. “I’m a realist.”

  The word chilled her. “I’m not a realist,” she said suddenly and impulsively. “I thought—I hoped—you wanted to see me, and all you wanted was to give me a book.” As soon as she said this she knew it was the height of gaucherie; he looked at her as if she was quite mad—as indeed she was, struggling to find and grasp reality after so many years of unreality. But she should not have let the words slip; they betrayed her.

  He said urgently, placing a hand on her arm, “I may not see you at breakfast, and I mustn’t be seen talking to you here. You understand this is of enormous value? You’ll deliver it?”

  She nodded, caught and touched by his urgency which at the same time struck her as ludicrous. “Don’t worry,” she told him reassuringly, for wasn’t reassurance what everyone wanted?

  He left as suddenly as he had come, and again she was alone under that arc of boundless sky, alone in the universe, in this whole bloody universe of which she was only one small and struggling atom filled with energy and problems. “How many different cognitive worlds there are,” she thought, staring somberly at the moving
clouds. “I’m not really heartless, that poor man may actually be running for his life—why didn’t it seem real to me? All I know is that I hoped he would ask me to dance, and he wants me to deliver a book.” She shook her head at the absurdity of this world she had newly entered and then, perversely, felt laughter stir inside of her. These damnable needs of hers! Actually, and upon second thought—if everything was a matter of attitude, as Dr. Szym suggested—it should be a lark to meet a secret agent, and under different circumstances she might even find it so, but not now, not when she felt so alone and defenseless. If only she’d not said what she said to him! Her face burned at the words that had leaped involuntarily from her lips, and at what he must think of her for having misunderstood his invitation!

  She decided to go to bed—it was lonely here now—and she walked down to her cabin and locked the door behind her. The music was a mockery to her now. She glanced only once at the package as she shoved it into the bottom of her suitcase but already it bore no interest for her because the encounter had not been—well, reassuring. It had taken something from her, diminished her confidence, her sense of value. She’d made a fool of herself—she knew it even if he didn’t—and it was better to put it out of her thoughts lest she conclude again that reality was a world she dared not inhabit.

  2

  They reached Bremerhaven an hour late, and suddenly Melissa found it difficult to endure the suspense and wanted an end to it. The ship was no longer an umbilical cord linking her to the safety of home but a dead instrument, to be discarded as quickly as possible because it could not hide her any longer. There was a great crush as the ship began its cumbersome maneuvering at the pier; the passageways became crammed, filled, blocked with passengers, which turned out to be very foolish because they stood for three quarters of an hour without moving. Melissa found herself wedged among total strangers with nothing to think about except the next few hours, but she was so numbed from suspense that even this did not matter greatly. Weakly she attempted to conjure up some kind of reality from the immediate past but when she tried to recall the faces of the college students, or the Fergusons, or even Stearns, they proved too distant. She had seen none of them for twenty-four hours; she was, again, alone—deserted by them all.