A Tree on Fire

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With four-week-old Mark wrapped in his woollen shawl she went out to the upper deck. Early morning, and the liner was landlocked, grappled in stoneland near the beginning of March, white frost painted on the customs sheds under a smoky pink sky, brilliant and sharply cold, more beautiful than she’d expected, a trace of cirrus cloud, as if just scratched there by a cry from the baby and an unthinking motion of his hand. She held him upright against her shoulder, and his uneasiness subsided.

The ship had died, she thought, watching the steward move her luggage into the first-class saloon, lost its beauty and function. The grace of the sea had withdrawn from it, left dead wood, subsiding metal, a mighty ship disembowelled of its own true spirit. She was anxious to move beyond dock cranes and sheds and dismal marshes, but stood back from the rail, an hour still to go before landing, feeling as if she’d never been to England before, a tourist about to enter a country for which no guide-book had been written. Frank had gone into the sun — or whatever he liked to call it, and the role of gun-runner to Algerian Nationalists fitted him more than most, except that here she was, landing as if she had already suffered her greatest loss because he might be dead and out of her life forever.

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