He had been a little odd at the wedding. She knew her mother thought so. He had been distracted, selectively deaf, bit his nails even (an unbecoming habit in a grown man). Given that there were only eight of them, and that he was an officer, she had thought his nervousness a little excessive.
‘Don’t be silly,’ her father had said. ‘All grooms are supposed to look like condemned men.’ Her mother had hit him playfully, and tried to raise a reassuring lipsticked smile.
Deanna had sulked. She had worn a blue suit, almost dark enough to be considered black, and Avice had complained about it to her mother, who had told her not to fuss. ‘It’s very hard for her, you being the first to get married,’ she had whispered. ‘Do you understand?’
Avice did. Only too well.
‘Still love me?’ she had said to him afterwards. Their parents had paid for everyone’s dinner and a night at the Melbourne Grand. Her mother had wept at the table and told her in a stage whisper, as she and Ian left to go upstairs, that it really wasn’t all that bad and it might help if she had a little drink or two first. Avice had smiled – a smile that reassured her mother and irritated the bejaysus out of her sister, to whom it said, I’m going to do It: I shall be a woman before you. She had even been tempted to tell her sister she had already done It the previous evening, but the way Deanna had been lately, she thought she was likely to blab to their mother and that was all she needed.
‘Ian? Do you still love me, now that I’m just boring Mrs Radley?’
They had reached their room. He closed the door behind her, took another swig of his brandy and loosened his collar. ‘Of course I do,’ he said. He had seemed more like himself then. He pulled her to him, and slid a warm hand chaotically up her thigh. ‘I love you to bits, darling girl.’
‘Forgiven me?’
His attention was already elsewhere. ‘Of course.’ He dropped his lips to her neck, and bit her gently. ‘I told you. I just don’t like surprises.’
‘I reckon there’s a storm brewing.’ Jones-the-Welsh checked the barometer at the side of the mess door, and lit another cigarette, then generated a shudder. ‘I can feel it inside me. Pressure like this – it’s got to break some time, right?’
‘What do you think that was this morning, Scotch mist?’
‘Call that a storm? That was a piss and a fart in a teacup. I’m talking about a proper storm, lads. A real wild woman of a storm. The kind that stands your hair on end, whips you round the chops and shreds your trousers afore you can say, “Ah, come on now, love. I was just calling you her name for a joke.”’
There was a rumble of laughter from various hammocks. Nicol, lying in his, heard the sound as a dull harbinger of darkening skies. Jones was right. There would be a storm. He felt tense, jittery, as if he had drunk too many cups of Arab coffee. At least, he told himself it was the storm.
In his mind Nicol saw, again, the imprint of that pale face, illuminated by moonlight. There had been no invitation in her glance, no coquettishness. She was not the kind of woman who considered flirting compensation for the condition of marriage. But there was something in her gaze. Something that told him of an understanding between them. A connection. She knew him. That was what he felt.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he said aloud, swinging his legs out of the hammock. He had not meant to speak, and as his feet hit the floor he felt self-conscious.
‘What’s the matter, Nicol, my love?’ Jones-the-Welsh put down his letter. ‘Someone done up your corset too tight? Not arrested enough people lately?’
Nicol closed his eyes. They were sore, gritty. Despite his exhaustion, sleep eluded him. It let him chase it through the daytime hours, occasionally suggesting that it would be his. Then as he relaxed, the urge evaporated and left him, with that imprint on the back of his eyelids. And an ache in his soul. How can I think like this? he would ask himself. Me of all people.
‘Headache,’ he said now, rubbing his forehead. ‘As you said. The pressure.’
He had told himself he was incapable of emotion. So shocked by the horrors of war, by the loss of so many around him that, like so many men, he had closed off. Now, forced to examine his behaviour honestly, he thought perhaps he had never loved his wife, that he had instead become caught up in expectation, in the idea that he should marry. He had had to – after she had revealed the consequence of what they had done. You married, you had your children and you grew old. Your wife grew sour with lack of attention; you grew bitter and introverted for your lost dreams; the children grew up and moved on, promising themselves they would not make the same mistakes. There was no room for wishful thinking, for alternatives. You Got On With It. Perhaps, he thought in his darkest moments, he found it hard to admit that war had freed him from that.
‘You know, Nic, the stokers are talking of having a party tonight. Now that the old lady’s settled down again.’ He patted the wall beside him. ‘I must say, it does seem a waste for all that female talent to miss out on the experience of a bit of good old naval hospitality. I thought I might look in later.’
Nicol reached for a boot and began to polish it. ‘You’re a dog,’ he said.
Jones-the-Welsh let out a joyous woof. ‘Oh, what’s the harm?’ he said. ‘Those who don’t want a bit of Welsh rarebit must be proper in love with their old men. So that’s lovely. Those who find the sea air has . . .’ here he raised an eyebrow ‘. . . given them a bit of an appetite, probably weren’t going to go the distance anyway.’
‘You can’t do it, Jones. They’re all married, for God’s sake.’
‘And I’m pretty sure some are already a little less married than they were when they set out. You heard about the episode on B Deck, didn’t you? And I was on middle watch outside 6E last night. That girl with the blonde hair’s a menace. Won’t bloody leave me alone. In and out, in and out . . . “Ooh, I’m just popping to the bathroom,” dressing-gown hanging open. I’m sure us men are the real victims in these things.’ He fluttered his eyelashes.
Nicol went back to his boots.
‘Ah, come on, Nicol. Don’t come over all married and judgemental on us. Just because you’re happy living by the rule book doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t enjoy ourselves a little.’
‘I think you should leave them alone,’ he said, closing his ears to the communal ‘woohoo!’ that met his words. There was a creeping lack of respect for the women, even among men he considered honourable, that made him uncomfortable.
‘And I think you should buck up a bit. Lidders here is coming, aren’t you, boy? And Brent and Farthing. Come with us – then you can see we’re behaving ourselves.’
‘I’m on duty.’
‘Of course you are. Pressed up to that dormitory door listening to those girls pant with longing.’ He cackled and jumped into his own hammock. ‘Oh, come on, Nicol. Marines are allowed a bit of fun too. Look . . . think of what we’re doing, right, as some kind of service. The entertainment of the Empire’s wives. For the benefit of the nation.’
With an extravagant salute, Jones leant back again. By the time Nicol had worked out an appropriately pithy response, Jones had fallen asleep, a lit Senior Service hanging loosely from his hand.
The men were boxing on the flight deck. Someone had set up a ring where the Corsairs had sat and in it Dennis Tims was battering several shades of something unrepeatable out of one of the seamen. His n**ed upper body a taut block of sinewy muscle, he moved without grace or rhythm around the ring. He was an automaton, a machine of destruction, his fists pounding bluntly until the darting, weaving young seaman succumbed and was hauled unconscious through the ropes and away. Four rounds in, there was such a terrible inevitability to his victories that the assembled men and brides were finding it hard to raise the enthusiasm to clap.
Frances, who had found it difficult to watch them, stood with her back to them. Tims, punching, was too close a reminder of the night of Jean’s ‘incident’. There was something in the power of his swing, in the brutal set of his jaw as he ploughed into the pale flesh presented to him that made her feel cold, even in this heat. She had wondered, when she and Jean had sat down, whether they should move away, for the younger girl’s sake. But Jean’s benign interest demonstrated that she had been too drunk to know what Tims had seen – or for that matter, what anyone else had done.
‘Hope they don’t get too hot and bothered,’ Jean said now, folding herself neatly into the spot beside Margaret. She seemed to find it difficult to sit still: she had spent the last hour wandering backwards and forwards between the ringside and their deck-chairs. ‘Have you heard? The water’s run out.’
Margaret looked at her. ‘What?’
‘Not drinking water, but the pump isn’t working properly and there’s no washing – not hair, clothes or anything – until they’ve mended it. Emergency rations only. Can you imagine? In this weather!’ She fanned herself with her hand. ‘I tell you there’s a bloody riot in the bathrooms. That Irene Carter might think she’s a right lady, but when her shower stopped you should have heard the language. Would have made old Dennis blush.’
Over the past week or so, Jean had recovered her good humour, so much so that her ceaseless and largely inconsequential chatter had taken on a new momentum. ‘You know Avice is taking Irene on for Queen of the Victoria? They’ve got the Miss Lovely Legs competition this afternoon. Avice has been down to the cases and persuaded the officer to let her get out her best pair of pumps. Four-inch heels in dark green satin to match her bathing suit.’
‘Oh.’
Tims followed an upper cut with a left hook. Then again. And again.
‘Are you all right, Maggie?’
Frances handed Margaret the ice-cream she had been proffering, unnoticed, for several seconds, exchanging a brief glance with Jean as she did so.
‘It – it’s not the baby, is it?’
Margaret turned to them. ‘No, I’m fine. Honest.’
She looked neither of them in the eye.
‘Oh, Dennis is in again. I’m going to see if anyone wants to have a wager with me. Mind you, I can’t see that anyone’s going to offer odds against him. Not at this rate.’ Jean got up, straightened her skirt, and skipped over to the other onlookers.
Margaret and Frances sat in silence with their ices. In the distance, a tanker moved across the horizon, and they followed its steady progress until it was no longer visible.
‘What’s that?’
Margaret looked at the letter in her hand, evidently having realised that the name of the addressee was showing.
Frances said nothing, but there was a question in her eyes. ‘Were you . . . going to throw it into the water?’
Margaret gazed out at the turquoise waves.
‘It . . . would be a nice thing to do. I had a patient once whose sweetheart got bombed, back in Germany. He wrote her a goodbye letter and we put it into a bottle and dropped it over the side of the hospital ship.’
‘I was going to post it,’ Margaret said.
Frances looked back at the envelope, checked that she’d read the name correctly. Then she turned to Margaret, perplexed. Behind her, voices were raised in shock at some misdemeanour in the ring, but she kept her eyes on the woman beside her.
‘I lied,’ said Margaret. ‘I let you think she was dead but she’s not. She left us. She’s been gone nearly two and a half years.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Yup.’ She waved the letter. ‘I don’t know why I brought it up here.’
Then Margaret began to talk, at first quietly, and then as if she no longer cared who heard.
It had been a shock. That much was an understatement. They had come home one day to find dinner bubbling on the stove, the shirts neatly pressed over the range, the floors mopped and polished and a note. She couldn’t take it any more, she had written. She had waited until Margaret’s brothers were home from the war, and Daniel had hit fourteen and become a man, and now she considered her job done. She loved them all, but she had to claw back a little bit of life for herself, while she still had some left. She hoped they would understand, but she expected they wouldn’t.