【荆棘鸟】第三章 15

"I wish you'd tell me, Mum."

  She sighed and shut the spinet¹, dusting the gold off her fingers. "There's nothing to tell, nothing at all. Come on, help me move these things into the middle of the room, so Daddy can pack them."

  The voyage was a nightmare. Before the Wahine was out of Wellington harbor they were all seasick², and they continued to be seasick all the way across twelve hundred miles of gale-stirred, wintry seas. Paddy took the boys up on deck and kept them there in spite of the bitter wind and constant spray, only going below to see his women and baby when some kind soul volunteered to keep an eye on his four miserable³, retching boys. Much though he yearned⁴ for fresh air, Frank had elected to remain below to guard the women. The cabin was tiny, stifling⁵ and reeked⁶ of oil, for it was below the water line and toward the bow, where the ship's motion was most violent. Some hours out of Wellington Frank and Meggie became convinced their mother was going to die; the doctor, summoned from first class by a very worried steward⁷, shook his head over her pessimistically. "Just as well it's only a short voyage," he said, instructing his nurse to find milk for the baby.

  Between bouts⁸ of retching Frank and Meggie managed to bottle-feed Hal, who didn't take to it kindly⁹. Fee had stopped trying to vomit¹⁰ and had sunk into a kind of coma¹¹, from which they could not rouse her. The steward helped Frank put her in the top bunk¹², where the air was a little less stale, and holding a towel to his mouth to stem the watery¹³ bile he still brought up, Frank perched himself on the edge beside her, stroking the matted yellow hair back from her brow. Hour after hour he stuck to his post in spite of his own sickness; every time Paddy came in he was with his mother, stroking her hair, while Meggie huddled¹⁴ on a lower berth¹⁵ with Hal, a towel to her mouth. Three hours out of Sydney the seas dropped to a glassy calm and fog stole in furtively¹⁶ from the far Antarctic, wrapping itself about the old ship. Meggie, reviving a little, imagined it bellowed¹⁷ regularly in pain now the terrible buffeting¹⁸ was over. They inched through the gluey greyness as stealthily as a hunted thing until that deep, monotonous¹⁹ bawl²⁰ sounded again from somewhere on the superstructure, a lost and lonely, indescribably sad noise. Then all around them the air was filled with mournful bellows²¹ as they slipped through ghostly smoking water into the harbor.