Available for the wedding of your dreams, a dazzling corporate event to woo your clients with the “wow” factor, or simply for an exclusive holiday you and your family will never forget, I read from the press pack as the train hurtled north, before turning to a floor plan of the cabin deck. There were four large suites in the nose of the boat—the prow, I supposed you’d call it, and a separate section with six smaller cabins arranged in a horseshoe shape at the back. Each cabin was numbered, odd and even on either side of a central corridor, with cabin 1 right in the tip of the prow, and cabins 9 and 10 adjoining each other in the curved stern of the boat. I guessed I’d be in one of the smaller cabins—presumably the suites were reserved for VIPs. There were no measurements on the floor plan and I frowned, remembering some of the cross-channel ferries I’d been on, the claustrophobic, windowless little rooms. The thought of spending five days in one of those wasn’t a comfortable one, but surely on a boat like this, we’d be talking something considerably more spacious?
I turned the page again, hoping to find a photo of one of the cabins to reassure myself, but instead I was confronted with a shot of a dazzling array of Scandinavian delicacies spread out on a white cloth. The chef on the Aurora had trained at Noma and elBulli, apparently. I yawned and pressed my hands into my eyes, feeling the grit of tiredness and the weight of everything from last night pressing down on me once again.
Judah’s face as I’d left him, stitched up with the blow from the night before, came into my head and I flinched. I wasn’t even sure what had happened. Had Judah and I broken up? Had I dumped him? Every time I tried to reconstruct the conversation, my exhausted brain took over, adding in stuff I hadn’t said, the responses I wished I’d made, making Judah more clueless and more insulting, to justify my own position, or alternatively more unconditionally loving, to try to convince myself this was all going to be okay. I hadn’t asked him to turn down the job. So why was I suddenly expected to be grateful for it?
I dozed off for about thirty painful minutes in the car from the station to the port, and when the car driver’s cheerful announcement broke into my sleep it was like a splash of cold water to the face. I stumbled out of the car into the searing sunshine and the salt-sting of the breeze, feeling bleary and dazed.
The driver had dropped me off almost at the end of the gangway, but as I looked across the steel bridge to the boat, I couldn’t quite believe we were in the right place. The pictures from the brochure were familiar—huge glass windows reflecting the sun without a single fingerprint or speck of salt water, and gleaming white paint so fresh that it could have been finished that morning. But what had been missing from the brochure photos was a sense of scale. The Aurora was so small—more like a large yacht than a small cruise liner. Boutique had been the phrase in the press pack—and now I saw what they meant. I’d seen bigger boats hopping around the Greek islands. It seemed impossible that everything mentioned in the brochure—library, sunroom, spa, sauna, cocktail lounge, and all the other things apparently indispensable to the Aurora’s pampered passengers—could fit into this miniature vessel. Its size, along with the perfection of its paintwork, gave it a curiously toylike quality, and as I stepped onto the narrow steel gangway I had a sudden disorienting image of the Aurora as a ship imprisoned in a bottle—tiny, perfect, isolated, and unreal—and of myself, shrinking down to match it with every step I took towards the boat. It was a strange feeling, as if I were looking down the wrong end of a telescope, and it gave me a dizzying sensation almost like vertigo.
The gangway shifted beneath my feet, the oily, inky waters of the harbor swirling and sucking beneath, and I had a momentary illusion that I was falling, the steel beneath my feet giving way. I shut my eyes and gripped the cold metal rail.
Then I heard a woman’s voice from up ahead.
“It’s a wonderful smell, isn’t it!”
I blinked. A stewardess was standing in the entrance to the ship. She was bright, almost white blond, with tanned walnut-brown skin, and beaming as if I were her rich, long-lost relative from Australia. I took a breath, trying to steady myself, and then made my way across the rest of the gangway and onto the Aurora Borealis.
“Welcome, Miss Blacklock,” the stewardess said as I entered. Her accent was slightly clipped in a way I couldn’t place, and her words somehow managed to convey the impression that encountering me was a life experience on a par winning the lottery. “I am so very pleased to welcome you on board. Can one of our porters take your case?”
I looked around me, trying to work out how she knew who I was. My bag was gone before I could protest.
“Can I offer you a glass of champagne?”
“Um,” I said, distinguishing myself with witty repartee. The stewardess took that for yes and I found myself accepting the dewy flute she put into my hand. “Uh, thanks.”
The interior of the Aurora was gobsmacking. The boat might be small, but they had crammed in enough bling for a vessel ten times the size. The gangway doors opened up onto the landing of a long, curving staircase and literally every surface that could be French polished, encased in marble, or draped with raw silk had been so. The whole flight was illuminated by an eye-watering chandelier, suffusing the place with tiny splashes of light that reminded me of nothing so much as the sun glinting off the sea on a summer’s day. It was slightly nauseating—not in a social-conscience sort of way, although if you thought about it too hard, that too. But more the disorientation—the way the crystals acted like a prism on every drop of light, dazzling you, throwing you off-balance with a sensation like peering into a child’s kaleidoscope. The effect, combined with lack of sleep, was not completely pleasant.
The stewardess must have seen me gawping, because she gave a proud smile.
“The Great Stairway is really something, isn’t it?” she said. “That one chandelier has more than two thousand Swarovski crystals.”
“Gosh,” I said faintly. My head throbbed and I tried to remember if I’d packed the ibuprofen. It was hard not to blink.
“We are very proud of the Aurora,” the stewardess continued warmly. “My name is Camilla Lidman and I am in charge of hospitality on the vessel. My office is on the lower deck, and if there is anything I can do to make your stay with us more enjoyable please do not hesitate to ask. My colleague Josef”—she indicated a smiling blond man to her right—“will show you to your cabin and give you a tour of the facilities. Dinner is at eight, but we would invite you to join us at seven p.m. in the Lindgren Lounge for a presentation on the boat’s facilities and the wonders you can expect to enjoy on this cruise of the famous Norwegian fjords and the Swedish archipelago islands. Ah! Mr. Lederer.”
A tall dark man in his forties was coming up the gangway behind us, followed by a porter struggling with a huge suitcase.
“Please be careful,” he said, wincing visibly as the porter bumped the trolley over a joint in the gangway. “That case has some very delicate equipment in it.”
“Mr. Lederer,” Camilla Lidman said, with the exact same amount of near-delirious enthusiasm she had injected into her welcome to me. I had to hand it to her; I was impressed at her acting skills, though in the case of Mr. Lederer it probably took less effort since he was kind of easy on the eye. “Let me welcome you aboard the Aurora. Can I offer you a glass of champagne? And Mrs. Lederer?”
“Mrs. Lederer won’t be coming,” Mr. Lederer said. He ran a hand through his hair and glanced up at the Swarovski chandelier with an air of slight bemusement.
“Oh, I am so sorry.” Camilla Lidman’s flawless brow puckered in a frown of concern. “I hope nothing is wrong.”
“Well, she’s in fine health,” Mr. Lederer said. “In fact, she’s fucking my best friend.” He smiled and took the champagne.
Camilla blinked and then said smoothly, almost without pause, “Josef, please do take Miss Blacklock to her cabin.”
Josef gave a little half bow and extended a hand towards the downward sweep of the staircase.
“This way, please?” he said.
I nodded dumbly and allowed myself to be ushered away, still clutching my glass of champagne. Over my shoulder I could hear Camilla telling Mr. Lederer about her office on the lower deck.