The Ship of Brides(111)
Author: Jojo Moyes

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she murmured, stepping forward. She did not open the door. They were all under the strictest instructions: there was to be no mixing this evening, the XO had warned, as if the fact of it being the last night might induce a kind of sexually charged madness.

For a moment he said nothing. Then, ‘I wanted to make sure you were all right.’

She shook her head in incomprehension and exhaled slowly. ‘I’m . . . fine.’

‘What I said . . . I didn’t mean . . .’

‘Please don’t worry.’ She didn’t want to have this conversation again.

‘I wanted to tell you . . . I’m glad. I’m glad to have met you. And I wish . . . I wish . . .’ There was a long silence. Her heart was pounding.

The singing had stopped. Somewhere, out in the Channel, a foghorn sounded. She stood there in the dark, waiting for him to speak again, then realised the conversation was ended. He had said all he was going to say.

Barely knowing what she was doing, Frances moved closer to the door. She laid her cheek against it, waiting in silence until she heard what she was waiting for. Then she stepped back and opened it.

In the dim light outside the infirmary, his eyes were shadowed, unreadable. She stared up at him, knowing that this was the last time she would see this man, trying to make herself accept a fate that for the first time she wanted to smash into little pieces. He was not hers to want. She had to keep telling herself that, even if every atom of her screamed the opposite.

‘Well.’ Her wavering, brilliant smile would have broken his heart. ‘Thank you. Thank you for looking after me. Us, I mean.’

Frances allowed herself a last look, and then, not sure why, she held out a slim hand to him. After a moment’s hesitation, he took it, and they shook solemnly, their eyes not leaving each other’s face.

‘Time to get to bed, boys. Got to be fresh for the morning!’

They stared at each other. Vincent Duxbury’s voice increased in volume as the infirmary door opened, throwing out a rectangular flood of light. ‘Home, boys! You’re going home tomorrow! “Home, home on the range . . .”’

She tugged him into the little room, and closed the door silently behind them. They stood inches apart, listening as the men fell out of the infirmary into the passageway. There was much slapping of backs and a brief, painful interlude of coughing.

‘I have to inform you,’ said Dr Duxbury, ‘that you are quite the finest band of men I have ever had the privilege . . . “My merry band of brothers . . .”’ His voice floated along the passageway, was briefly joined in tuneless discord by the others.

She was so close he could feel her breath upon him. Her body was rigid, listening, her hand still unwittingly in his. Her cool skin was blistering.

‘“My merry band” . . . la la la la.’ If it hadn’t been that she had chosen that moment to look up at him he might never have done it. But she had raised her face, lips parted, as if in a question, and put her hand to the cut above his brow, tracing it with her fingertips. Instead of stepping away from her, as he had intended, he raised his hand to hers, touching it, and then, more firmly, enclosing it within his own.

The singers outside increased in volume, then broke into conversation. Someone fell over and from a distance there was a muffled ‘You there!’, the brisk steps of someone in authority.

Nicol hardly heard them. He heard instead her faint exhalation, felt the answering tremble in her fingertips. His skin burning, he brought her hand down, let it slide across his face, feeling no pain even as it touched those places that were sore and bruised. And then he pressed it, hard, to his mouth.

She hesitated, and then, with a sound that was like a little gasp of despair, she pulled back her hand and her mouth lifted to his, her hands gripping his now as if she would make them stay on her for ever.

It was sweet, so sweet as to be indecent. Nicol wanted to absorb her into him, to fill her, enclose her, take her in to his very being. I knew this! some part of him rejoiced. I know her! Fleetingly, as he became aware of the heat of his own desperate need, he felt a hint of danger, something condemnatory, and was unsure whether it was directed at her or himself. But then his eyes opened and locked with hers, and in their infinite pain and longing there was something so shocking, so honest that he found he could not breathe. And as he lowered his face to hers again it was she who pulled back, one hand raised to her lips, her eyes still on his. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’ She glanced briefly at Avice, still asleep on the bed, then lifted a hand fleetingly to his cheek, as if imprinting the sight and feel of him on some hidden part of her.

Then she was gone, the men outside exclaiming as they tried to grasp what they had seen. The storeroom door closed gently but firmly between them, the dull metallic clang like that of a prison gate.

The ceremony was carried out at nearly half past eleven on Tuesday night. In different circumstances, it would have been a beautiful night for a wedding: the moon hung low and magnified in a tropical sky, bathing the camp in a strange blue light, while the whispering breeze barely disturbed the palm trees, but offered discreet relief from the heat.

Aside from the bride and groom, there were just three people in attendance: the chaplain, the matron and Captain Baillie. The bride, her voice barely audible, sat by the groom for the entire service. The chaplain crossed himself several times after the ceremony, and prayed that he had done the right thing. The matron shushed the captain’s own thoughts that he might not be, and reminded him that, given the state of the world around them, this one small act should not play on his conscience.

The bride sat, head bowed, and held the hand of the man beside her, as if in apology. At the end of the service she placed her pale face in her hands and sat still for some time, until her face emerged again, gasping slightly, like a swimmer breaking through water.

‘Are we done?’ said the matron, who seemed the most composed of them all.

The chaplain nodded, his brow still furrowed, eyes cast down.

‘Sister?’ The girl opened her eyes. She seemed unable, or unwilling, to look at the people around her.

‘Right,’ said Audrey Marshall, looking at her watch and reaching for her notes. ‘Time of death, eleven forty-four.’

24

When the aircraft carrier Victorious reached Plymouth last night . . . some of the girls were so eager to get a glimpse of Britain that they crowded against a stanchion till it collapsed and twenty of them fell eight feet to the deck below. They were unhurt. One bride could not share the general excitement. She learnt at the end of her 13,000-mile journey that her husband who was to have met her had been posted missing after a flying accident.