The Ship of Brides(56)
Author: Jojo Moyes

‘Margaret O’Brien?’

Margaret was out of her chair with a speed that belied her cumbersome frame. Breathless, she launched herself at the sheaf of letters proffered towards her, and returned, glowing and triumphant, her failure to get ashore forgotten. She wondered, briefly, whether she could go to the cabin and read them in private without causing offence. But just as she was about to ask, she heard a chair scrape back, and looked up from the envelopes to see Avice seat herself carefully in front of them.

There was a brief pause. Margaret, a little taken aback that Avice had chosen to seat herself among them after the previous evening’s quarrel, wondered if she might be about to apologise.

‘I’ve got news,’ Avice said.

‘So have I,’ said Jean. ‘Look. Seven letters. Seven!’

‘No,’ said Avice. She had a contained smile on her face, as if she harboured some great secret. It was a different Avice from the furious, tight-lipped girl who had left their cabin several hours earlier. ‘I have real news,’ she said, her chin jutting out. ‘I’m expecting.’

There was a stunned silence.

‘Expecting what?’ said Jean.

‘A baby, of course. I’ve been to the doctor.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Frances. ‘Dr Duxbury doesn’t strike me as . . . the most reliable . . .’ She thought of the last time she had seen him, singing blindly into a stores cupboard.

‘Oh, so nurses know more than doctors now, do they?’

‘No, I’m just—’

‘Dr Duxbury has taken a blood test, but in the meantime he asked me lots of questions and did an examination. He’s pretty certain.’ She smoothed her hair and glanced around, perhaps hoping to impart such momentous news to a wider audience.

‘I guess it makes sense,’ said Margaret, ‘now I think about it.’

The two other women looked at each other.

Avice couldn’t retain her composure. Her face lit up, cheeks pink with excitement. ‘A baby! Can you imagine? I knew I couldn’t be seasick. I’ve been yachting loads of times and that didn’t make me ill. Margaret, you must tell me everything I need to buy. Do you think they sell baby clothes in England? I shall have to get Mummy to send over all sorts of things.’

Margaret stood up and reached over the table to hug her. ‘Avice,’ she said, ‘it’s great news. Congratulations. How wonderful for you both.’

‘Strewth,’ said Jean, wide-eyed. ‘So all that seasickness was really you expecting?’ She looked genuinely pleased. Frances hasn’t told her of Avice’s betrayal, Margaret thought, and felt suddenly sad for her.

‘He thinks I’m already nine or ten weeks along. I was rather shocked when he told me. But I’m so excited. Ian’s going to be thrilled. He’ll be such a good father,’ Avice trilled, one slim hand resting on her flat stomach, already lost in a vision of future family life.

Margaret marvelled at her ability to wipe out the events of the past hours.

‘Stan got a tattoo of my name,’ Jean told her, but Avice didn’t hear.

‘I think I shall put in a special request to the captain to wire my family and tell them the news. I don’t think I can bear to wait until we reach England.’ Her name, called in clipped tones, echoed through the canteen. ‘Letters!’ she said, standing. ‘Letters! In all the excitement I hadn’t even thought – oh, you two have got yours.’ She looked at Frances, as if suddenly remembering, and said nothing.

‘Congratulations,’ said Frances. She didn’t look at Avice.

Frances’s name was called an hour later; it was almost the last, and cut across the canteen when the once-packed room was nearly empty. Margaret had thought several times about leaving them all to drink in Joe’s words in private, then re-examine them with the benefit of silence, but there was such bad blood between the other girls now, and Jean was still fragile, that she felt obliged to wait.

Avice had received two letters from her family, and two very old ones from Ian, sent only days after he had left Sydney. ‘Look at the date on them,’ she had said crossly. She had seemed to count it as a personal insult that Jean and Margaret had received more than she had. ‘Ian’s are nearly six weeks old. Honestly, you’d think the least the Navy could do is make sure we get our letters on time. How on earth am I meant to tell him about the baby if he’s going to get my next letter a week after we reach Plymouth?’

She studied the postmark bad-temperedly. ‘It’s really not on. I should have had lots more by now. They’re probably piled up in some godforsaken outpost somewhere.’

‘I think you were just unlucky, Avice,’ said Margaret, absently. She had reread Joe’s first several times now. He had numbered them thoughtfully so that she could read them in the correct order. ‘Hello, love,’ he had written. ‘Hoping by the time you get this you’ll be on board the Victoria. Couldn’t believe it when you told me you’d be on that old girl. Keep a lookout for Archie Littlejohn. He’s a radio man. We trained together back in ’44. Good chap. He’ll look out for you. Then again I reckon there’s not a man on board who won’t look out for you girls. They’re a good bunch on the Vic.’

Margaret gulped as his words became audible in her imagination, and thought of Joe’s trusting faith in the good nature of the men around him. She sneaked a look at Jean, who was gazing intently at Stan’s letters. ‘Want me to teach you?’ she asked. ‘While we’re on board? Bet we could have you reading by the time we disembark.’

‘Really?’

‘Nothing to it,’ said Margaret. ‘An hour or two a day and you’ll be a regular bookworm.’

‘Stan doesn’t know . . . about the reading. I always got my mate Nancy to write letters for me, see?’ she said. ‘But then I remembered when I came aboard that if anyone else writes them it’ll be in different handwriting.’

‘All the more reason to get you started,’ said Margaret. ‘You’ll be able to write your own And I bet you Stan won’t know any different.’

Jean’s obvious delight lightened the mood. ‘You really think I could do it?’ she kept saying, and grinning when Margaret responded in the affirmative. Her mother had always told her she was thick, Jean revealed, her eyes darting between them. ‘Mind you, she’s gotta be the thick one. She’s stuck back there working in the cracker factory, and I’m on a ship to Blighty. Right?’