Going Ashore Read Free Page B

once.
    “I’m not waiting for
him
to make up
his
mind,” her mother had said, which was, to Emma, scarcely an answer at all. “I’ve got my life, too. I mean,” she amended, “we have, Emma. We’ve got a life, too. We’ll go away. We’ll go on a cruise or something.”
    “Maybe he’d like that,” Emma had said, with such innocent accuracy that her mother, presented with the thought, stared at her, alarmed. “Then he could have the place all to himself.”
    In November, they joined the cruise. They had come aboard wearing summer dresses, confident in the climate promised by travel posters – the beaches, the blue-painted seas, the painted-yellow suns. Their cabin was full of luggage and flowers. Everything was new – their white bags, the clothes inside them, neatly folded, smelling of shops.
    “It’s a new life, Emma,” said Mrs. Ellenger.
    Emma had caught some of the feeling, for at last they were doing something together, alone, with no man, no Uncle Anyone, to interfere. She felt intensely allied to her mother, then and for several days after. But then, when it became certain that the miracle, the new life, had still to emerge, the feeling disappeared. Sometimes she felt it again just before they reached land – some strange and unexplored bit of coast, where anything might happen. The new life was always there, just before them, like a note indefinitely suspended or a wave about to break. It was there, but nothing happened.
    All this, Emma sensed without finding words, even in her mind, to give the idea form. When her mother, helpless and lost, asked why they had come, she could only sit on her bed, playing with her doll’s shoe, and, embarrassed by the spectacle of such open unhappiness, murmur, “I don’t know. I don’t know why we came at all.”
    Answers and explanations belonged to another language, one she had still to acquire. Even now, in Tangier, longing to explain to the Munns about the summer dresses, she knew she had better not begin. She knew that there must be a simple way of putting these things in words, but when Mrs. Munn spoke of going ashore, of the importance of keeping the throat and ankles warm, it was not in Emma’s grasp to explain how it had come about that although she and her mother had shopped all summer and had brought with them much more luggage than they needed, it now developed that they had nothing to wear.
    “Perhaps we shall see you in Tangier, later today,” said Mrs. Munn. “You must warn your mother about Tangier. Tell her to watch her purse.”
    Emma nodded vigorously. “I’ll tell her.”
    “And tell her to be careful about the food if you lunch ashore,” Mrs. Munn said, beginning to gather together her guidebooks. “No salads. No fruit. Only bottled water. Above all, no native restaurants.”
    “I’ll tell her,” Emma said again.
    After the Munns had departed, she sat for a moment, puzzled. Certainly they would be lunching in Tangier. For the first time, now she remembered something. The day before (or had it been the day before that?) Emma had invited Eddy, the bartender, to meet them in Tangier for lunch. She had extended the invitation with no sense of what it involved, and no real concept of place and time. North Africa was an imaginary place, half desert, half jungle. Then, this morning, she had looked through the porthole above her bed. There was Tangier, humped and yellowish, speckled with houses, under a wintry sky. It was not a jungle but a city, real. Now the two images met and blended. Tangier was a real place, and somewhere in those piled-up city blocks was Eddy, waiting to meet them for lunch.
    She got up at once and hurried back to the cabin. The lounge was clearing; the launch, carrying passengers ashore across the short distancethat separated them from the harbor, had been shuttling back and forth since nine o’clock.
    Emma’s mother was up, and – miracle – nearly dressed. She sat at the dressing table, pinning an artificial