The Ship of Brides(29)
Author: Jojo Moyes

‘Joe.’

‘Mine’s Stan.’

‘You said.’

‘Stan Castleforth. He’s nineteen on Tuesday. His mum wasn’t too happy when he told her he’d got wed, but he says she’s calmed down a bit now.’

Margaret lay back, staring at the blackness above her, thinking of the warm letters she had received from Joe’s mother and wondering whether courage or foolhardiness had sent a half-child alone to the other side of the world. ‘I’m sure she’ll be fine once you get to know each other,’ she said, when continued silence might have suggested the opposite.

‘From Nottingham,’ said Jean. ‘D’you know it?’

‘No.’

‘Nor me. But he said it’s where Robin Hood came from. So I reckon it’s probably in a forest.’

Jean shifted again, and Margaret could hear her rummaging at the end of the bunk. ‘Mind if I have a smoke?’ she hissed.

‘Go ahead.’

There was a brief flare, and she glimpsed Jean’s illuminated face, rapt in concentration as she lit her cigarette. Then the match was shaken out, and the cabin returned to darkness.

‘I think about Stan loads, you know,’ she said. ‘He’s dead handsome. All my mates thought so. I met him outside the cinema and he and his mate offered to pay for me and mine to go in. Ziegfield Follies. In technicolour.’ She exhaled. ‘He told me he hadn’t kissed a girl since Portsmouth and I couldn’t really say no in the circumstances. He had a hand up my skirt before “This Heart Of Mine”.’

Margaret heard her humming the tune.

‘I got married in parachute silk. My aunt Mavis got it for me from a GI she knew who did bent radios. My mum’s not really up for all that stuff.’ She paused. ‘In fact, I get on better with my aunt Mavis. Always have done. My mum reckons I’m a waste of skin.’

Margaret shifted on to her side, thinking of her own mother. Of her constancy, her bossy, exasperated maternal presence, her freckled hands, lifting to pin her hair out of the way several hundred times a day. She found her mouth had dried.

‘Was it different, when you got . . . you know?’

‘What?’

‘Did you have to do it differently . . . to have a baby, I mean.’

‘Jean!’

‘What?’ Jean’s voice rose in indignation. ‘Someone’s got to tell me.’

Margaret sat up, careful not to bang her head on the bunk above. ‘You must know.’

‘I wouldn’t be asking, would I?’

‘You mean no one’s ever told you . . . about the birds and the bees?’

Jean snorted. ‘I know where he’s got to put it, if that’s what you’re talking about. I quite like that bit. But I don’t know how doing that leads to babies.’

Margaret was shocked into silence, but a voice came from above: ‘If you’re going to be so coarse as to discuss these matters in company,’ it said, ‘you could at least do it quietly. Some of us are trying to sleep.’

‘I bet Avice knows,’ giggled Jean.

‘I thought you said you’d lost a baby,’ said Avice, pointedly.

‘Oh, Jean. I’m so sorry.’ Margaret’s hand went involuntarily to her mouth.

There was a prolonged silence.

‘Actually,’ Jean said, ‘I wasn’t exactly carrying as such.’

Margaret could hear Avice shifting under her covers.

‘I was . . . well, a bit late with my you-know-what. And my friend Polly said that meant you were carrying. So I said I was because I knew it would help me get on board. Even though when I worked out the dates I couldn’t really have been, if you know what I mean. And then they had to postpone my medical check twice. When they did it I said I’d lost it and I started crying because by then I’d almost convinced myself that I was and the nurse felt sorry for me and said no one needed to know one way or the other, and that the most important thing was getting me over to my Stan. It’s probably why they’ve stuck me in with you, Maggie.’ She took a deep drag of her cigarette. ‘So, there you are. I didn’t mean to lie exactly.’ She rolled over, picked up a shoe and stubbed out her cigarette on the sole. Her voice took on a hard, defensive edge: ‘But if any of you dob me in, I’ll just say I lost it on board anyway. So there’s no point in telling.’

Margaret laid her hands on her stomach. ‘Nobody’s going to tell on you, Jean,’ she said.

There was a deafening silence from Avice’s bunk.

Outside, an unknown distance away, they could hear a foghorn. It sounded a single low, melancholy note.

‘Frances?’ said Jean.

‘She’s asleep,’ whispered Margaret.

‘No, she’s not. I saw her eyes when I lit my ciggie. You won’t tell on me, Frances, will you?’

‘No,’ said Frances, from the bunk opposite. ‘I won’t.’

Jean got out of bed. She patted Margaret’s leg, then climbed nimbly back up to her bunk, where she could be heard rustling herself into comfort. ‘So, come on, then,’ she said eventually. ‘Who likes doing it, and what is it that makes you actually get a baby?’

On the flight deck, a thousand-pound bomb from a Stuka aircraft looks curiously like a beer barrel. It rolls casually from the underbelly of the sinister little plane, with the same g*y insouciance as if it were about to be rolled down the steps of a beer cellar. Surrounded by its brothers, flanked by a bunched formation of fighter planes, it seems to pause momentarily in the sky, then float down towards the ship, guided, as if by an invisible force, towards the deck.

This is one of the things Captain Highfield thinks as he stares up at his impending death. This, and the fact that, when the wall of flame rises up from the armoured deck, engulfing the island, the ship’s command centre, its blue-white heat clawing upwards, and he is possessed of the immobilising terror, as he had always known he would be, he has forgotten something. Something he had to do. And in his blind paralysis even he is dimly aware of how ridiculous it is to be casting around for some unremembered task while he faces immolation.

Then, in the raging heart of the fire, as the bombs rain around him, bouncing off the decks, as his nostrils sting with the smell of burning fuel and his ears refuse to close to the screams of his men, he looks up to see a plane, where there is no plane. It, too, is engulfed, yellow flames licking at the cockpit, the tilted wings blackened, but not enough to obscure, within, Hart’s face, which is untouched, his eyes questioning as he faces the captain.