Voyage in the Dark

Anna Morgan, 18, is a lost ingenue, adrift in a foreign land, exiled from her native West Indies after the death of her father. She has a job as a chorus girl and travels through the dark, dismal towns of Edwardian England, where "everything was always so exactly alike", residing in cold, dank boarding houses, reminiscing about her homeland, where the "light is gold and when you shut your eyes you see fire-colour". Later, when she "settles" in London, she hooks up with a much older man, Walter Jeffries, to whom she becomes financially and emotionally dependent. She does not know he is married and when, eventually, he calls the affair off, Anna is unexpectedly bereft, unable to understand what she has done wrong. Lonely and depressed, often ill and curled up in bed, where she "sleeps like the dead", Anna is taken in by Ethel Matthews, an older woman who is a Swedish masseuse ("When I say I'm a masseuse I don't mean like some of these dirty foreigners."). Living in Ethel's posh flat off Oxford Street, Anna tries to earn a living doing manicures as part of Ethel's business. But she spends most of her time drinking and bringing strange men back to her room instead, unwittingly offending Ethel.