‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
His fingers tightened on her. It was a sweltering night and they slid on her skin as they gripped her. ‘I think you do, sweetheart. You’re not a stupid girl.’
She refused, flushed to the roots of her hair that he had considered her capable of such a thing. She refused again, and tried, in one outraged look, to convey her hurt at what he had suggested. She half ran towards the stairs, tears of humiliation pricking her eyes, desperate to escape to the safety of her own room, conscious of the eyes of the other girls upon her, the catcalling of the now ever-present troops. But then she heard his thunderous steps behind her. By the time she reached her room he was behind her.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he yelled at her, whipping her round to face him. His face was the same colour as it had been when he had accused her mother of stealing.
‘Get off me!’ she screamed. ‘I can’t believe you’re asking me to do such a thing!’
‘How dare you embarrass me like that! After all I’ve done for you – looking after you, forgetting all that money your mum stole off me, buying you dresses, taking you out, when everyone else in this town said I shouldn’t touch any of the Luke family with a ten-foot pole . . .’
She was seated now, her hands pressed to her face as if she could block him out. Downstairs she heard someone break into song, and an answering jeer.
‘Neville’s a good friend of mine, you understand, you silly little girl? A very good friend. And his son’s off to war and he’s blue as anything and I’m just trying to take his mind off it all – and so here we are, the three of us having a nice evening, all friends together, and you start behaving like some spoilt kid! How do you think that makes Neville feel?’
She tried to interrupt but he stopped her.
‘I thought you were better than that, Frances.’ Here his voice dropped, became conciliatory. ‘One of the things I always liked about you was that you were a caring sort of a girl. You didn’t like to see people unhappy. Well, it’s not a lot to ask in the great scheme of things, is it? Just to help someone whose son’s gone off to maybe lose his life in battle?’
‘But I—’ She didn’t know how to answer him. She began to cry, lifted a hand to her face.
He took it in one of his. ‘I’ve never forced you to do anything, have I?’
‘No.’
‘Look, sweetheart, Neville’s a nice man, isn’t he?’
A small, grey-haired moustachioed mouse of a man. He had grinned at her all night. She had thought he found her conversation entertaining.
‘And you care about me, don’t you?’
She nodded mutely.
‘It would mean such a lot to him. And to me. Come on, sweetheart, it’s not like I ask much of you, is it?’ He lifted her face to his. Forced her to open her eyes.
‘I don’t want to,’ she whispered. ‘Not that.’
‘It’s half an hour of your life. And it’s not like you don’t enjoy it, is it?’
She didn’t know how to reply. She had never been sober enough to remember.
He seemed to take her silence as acquiescence. He led her to the mirror. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘you go and straighten yourself up a bit. No one wants to see a face full of tears. I’ll have a couple of drinks brought up to you – that nice brandy you like – and then I’ll send Neville up. You two will get on fine.’ He hadn’t looked at her as he’d left the room.
After that she lost count of the number of times she did it. She knew only that each time she had been progressively more drunk – once she had been ill and the man had asked for his money back. Mr Radcliffe got crosser and crosser, and she spent as much time as she could hiding in the bathroom, scrubbing her skin until it came off in raw red patches so that the girls winced as she walked by.
Finally, on the last occasion, as the bar grew noisier and the stairs were heavy with footfall, Hun Li had caught her when she ducked into the cellar. She had secreted a bottle of rum there and, faced with two off-duty servicemen who had gleaned the impression from Mr Radcliffe that they might get the chance to spend some time with her, she had stood in the corner between the Castlemaine and McCracken barrels, swigging from a bottle that was already half empty.
‘Frances!’
She had whipped round. Drunk, it had taken her time to focus, and she recognised him only by his blue shirt and broad arms. ‘Don’t say nothing,’ she slurred, putting down the bottle. ‘I’ll put the money in the till.’
He had stepped closer to her, under the bare lightbulb, and she wondered whether he wanted to paw at her too. ‘You must go,’ he said. He flicked at a moth near his face.
‘What?’
‘You must go from here. This place no good.’
It was the most he had said to her in almost eighteen months. She had laughed then, bitter, angry laughter that turned into sobbing. Then she had bent over, clutching her sides, unable to catch her breath.
He had stood awkwardly in front of her, then stepped forward gingerly, as if fearful of touching her. ‘I got this for you,’ he said.
She had wondered, briefly, if he was going to give her a sandwich. And then she saw that his fist was full of money, a dirty great wad of it. ‘What’s this?’ she whispered.
‘That man last week. The one—’ He faltered, not knowing how best to describe Mr Radcliffe’s latest ‘friend’. ‘The one with the flash suit. He got a gambling place. I stole this from his car.’ He thrust his fist at her. ‘You take it. Go tomorrow. You can pay Mr Musgrove to take you to the station.’
She didn’t move, and he thrust his fist forward insistently. ‘Go on. You earned it.’
She stared at the money, wondering if she was drunk enough to have imagined this scene. But when she put out a finger, it was solid. ‘You don’t think he’ll tell Mr Radcliffe?’
‘So what? You be gone then. There’s a train leaves tomorrow. Go on. You go.’ When she said nothing, he made a mock-angry face. ‘This is no good for you, Frances. You’re a good girl.’
A good girl. She stared at this man, whom she had thought hardly capable of speech, let alone such kindness. She took the money and put it into her pocket. His sweat had softened the notes, and they crumpled as they slid between the fabric. Then she moved to take his hand to say thank you.
When his failed to meet hers she grasped that Hun Li’s sympathy might be tinged with something she didn’t want to think about. Something that in just three months her ‘profession’ had bestowed on her.
He nodded at her, as if ashamed of his own reticence.
‘What about you?’ she said.
‘What about me?’
‘You don’t need this for yourself?’ She didn’t want to ask him: she could already feel it glowing beneficently in her pocket.
His face was unreadable. ‘I never needed it like you,’ he said. Then he turned, and his broad back vanished into the darkness.
16
Laundry: Limited facilities only exist for laundry onboard . . . Never hang anything out of a scuttle or port hole or anywhere where it can be seen from outboard.
Instructions for Women Passengers, HMS Victorious
Twenty-five days
‘Poor old girl. It wasn’t a fate you deserved, however you look at it.’ He laid his hand gently on her, sensing, he fancied, the years of struggle echoing through the cool metal. ‘Too good for them. Far too good.’
He straightened up, then glanced behind him, conscious that he was talking aloud to his ship and keen to ensure that Dobson had not witnessed it. Dobson had been thoroughly discomfited by the captain’s changes in normal routine, and while he had enjoyed unbalancing the younger man, he recognised that there was only so far he could go before he became answerable to someone else.
There had not been a square inch of Indomitable that Highfield hadn’t known, no part of her history with which he wasn’t familiar. He had seen her decks submerged in high seas in the Adriatic, her huge frame tossed around as if she were a rowing-boat in a storm. He had steered her through the Arctic in the winter of ’41, when her decks had been six inches thick with snow, and her gun turrets had become so encrusted with ice that twenty ratings with picks and shovels had had to spend hours trying to keep her workable. He had held her steady as she fought off the suicide bombers of the Sakishima Gunto airfields, when the kamikaze aircraft had literally bounced off the flight deck, covering her with tidal waves of water and aviation fuel, and he had swept her through the Atlantic, listening in silence for the ominous echo that told of enemy submarines. He had seen her flight deck a huge crater when, during the early part of the war, no less than three Barracudas had collided in mid-air and crashed on to it. He was not sure whether he could count the number of men they had lost, the funerals at sea that he had presided over, the bodies committed to the water. And he had seen her at her last. Watched her deck canting as she slid down, taking with her those few men they had told him were already gone, his beloved boy, his body somewhere in the inferno that belched foul smoke over what remained above the surface, his funeral pyre. When her bow had sunk and the waves closed over her, there had been no sign left that she had existed at all.
The Victoria’s layout was identical to that of her twin; there had been something almost eerie about it when he had first stepped aboard. For a while he had been resentful. Now he felt a perverse obligation to her.
They had contacted him that morning. The commander-in-chief of the British Pacific Fleet had wired him personally. In joking terms he had told Highfield that he could lay off the painting parties for the remainder of the voyage: no need to exhaust the men with too much maintenance. The Victoria would be examined in dry dock at Plymouth before being modified and sold off to some merchant shipping company or broken up. ‘Nothing wrong with the old girl,’ he had wired back. ‘Suggest most strongly the former course.’
He had not told the men: he suspected most would not notice what ship they were on, as long as the messes were of a decent size, the money regular and the food edible. With the war over, many would leave the Navy for good. He, and the old ship, would be no more than a dim memory when war stories were exchanged over dinner.
Highfield sighed, and placed his weight tentatively on his bad leg. They would dock at Bombay the following day. He would pay no attention to the C-in-C’s instruction. For several days now he had had teams of dabbers and ratings buffing, painting, polishing. The Navy knew that sailors kept busy were sailors less likely to get into trouble – and with a cargo like this one that struggle was constant. There would not be a brass bolt on the ship that he couldn’t see his face in.
The men, he guessed, were speculating that something was wrong with him. It was possible too that the governor of Gibraltar would notice. He was not a stupid man. I’m buggered if I’m leaving you early, he told the ship silently, tightening his grip on the rail. I’ll hang on to you till my damn leg falls off.
‘What you do, ladies, is mix one level tablespoon of the powdered egg with two tablespoons of water. Allow it to stand for a few minutes until the powder has absorbed all the moisture, then work out any lumps with a wooden spoon. You may have to be a bit vigorous . . . a bit of elbow grease, you know.’ She took in the blank faces. ‘That’s an English expression. It doesn’t mean . . . grease as such.’
Margaret sat with her notebook on her lap, her pen in her hand. She had given up writing several recipes ago, distracted by the murmur of conversation around her.
‘A prostitute? I don’t believe it. Surely the Navy wouldn’t let one travel with all the men.’
‘Well, they didn’t know, did they? They can’t have.’
‘There are all sorts of things you can bake with powdered egg. Add a bit of parsley or watercress and you can make quite a good . . . approximation of scrambled egg. So don’t feel limited just because you may not have the ingredients you’ve been used to at home. In fact, girls, you will not have the kind of ingredients you’ve been used to at home.’