The Ship of Brides(64)
Author: Jojo Moyes

Avice, who for the last week had ignored her, had spent several hours making friends with the girls around them, capitalising on her new status as pregnant wife. Margaret, after fretting a little while about Maude Gonne and being reassured by Frances, who had sneaked down on a pretext and found her sleeping comfortably, had flaked out not twenty minutes after they settled and was now snoring to her left, her belly, under a paper-thin man’s shirt, propped on Frances’s pillow.

Frances was pleased to see it: she had felt pangs of sympathy for Margaret, swollen and uncomfortable in the heat, twisting and turning on her bunk in a vain attempt to get comfortable.

Initially Frances had felt a little self-conscious in her bathing suit, but confronted with the exposed limbs and midriffs of several hundred women of all shapes and sizes (some in the minuscule new bikinis), she soon realised that such self-absorption was ridiculous. Once the marines had got over the shock of what they were guarding they had lost interest too; several were now playing cards on crates by the bridge, while others chatted among themselves, apparently oblivious to the near-naked sleeping bodies behind them.

Could they really be so uninterested? Frances wondered. Could any man really feel so sanguine, faced with so much bare female flesh? But, try as she might, she could see nothing in their manner to justify her discomfort. Eventually she had allowed her own sheet to drop around her, had adjusted herself so that her semi-upright body caught the maximum of the breeze that whispered across the deck. And when she did see one of the men glance longingly in their direction, still dressed in his high-necked tropical rig, she was forced to the conclusion that it was probably the women’s coolness that they coveted, rather than their bodies.

She must have slept for a few hours after midnight. Most of the girls around her had slept soundly, the lack of several nights’ sleep a demolition ball against the novel circumstances that might have kept them awake. But she couldn’t help herself: being among so many people made her uncomfortable. Eventually, she had sat up and decided, gracefully, to give in to wakefulness, simply to enjoy the freedom to sit out there without fear of discovery. She wrapped her cotton sheet loosely round her shoulders, and trod carefully to the edge of the group, from where she could just make out the foamed movement of the ship in the ocean. Eventually she found a spot away from everyone, and sat, thinking of nothing, staring into the distance.

‘You all right?’ It was said quietly, so that only she could hear.

The marine was standing a few feet away from her, his face carefully turned to the front.

‘I’m fine,’ she murmured. She kept hers towards the sea, as if they were in mutual pretence that they were not in conversation.

He stood there for some time. Frances was acutely conscious of the stillness of his legs beside her, braced a little as if in preparation for some unseen swell.

‘You like it up here, don’t you?’ he asked.

‘Very much. It might sound a little silly. But I’ve found the sea makes me feel . . . well, happy.’

‘You didn’t look very happy earlier.’

She wondered that she could talk to him like this. ‘I suppose the emptiness of it all overwhelmed me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t feel comforted . . . the way I usually do.’

‘Ah.’ She felt, rather than saw his nod. ‘Well, she rarely does what you expect her to.’

They were silent for a while, Frances unbalanced because they were no longer divided by a steel door. Initially she had pulled her sheet up round her neck so that she was almost totally enclosed by it. Now, she decided that was silly, a kind of extreme reaction to his presence. And she let it slide down over her shoulders. While reddening at her own audacity.

‘Your whole face changes when you’re up here.’

She glanced up at him quickly. Perhaps he grasped that he had overstepped some mark because he kept his eyes on the ocean. ‘I know how it feels,’ he added. ‘It’s why I like to stay at sea.’

What about your children, she wanted to ask, but couldn’t frame it so that it didn’t sound like an accusation. Instead she stole a peep at his face. She wanted to ask him why he seemed so sad when he had so much to return to. But he turned and their eyes locked. Her hand lifted of its own volition to her face, as if to shield herself from him.

‘Do you want me to leave you alone?’ he said quietly.

‘No,’ she said. The word was out before she had had time to think about it. And then both silenced, by awkwardness or surprise that she had said anything, he stood beside her, her personal sentry, as they stared out over the dark waters.

The first slivers of light, fierce and electric, appeared thousands of miles distant on the horizon shortly before five. He told her of how the sunrises could change, depending on which part of the equator they were travelling through, sometimes slow and languorous, a gentle flooding of the sky with creamy blue light, at others a brief, almost aggressive sparking, short-circuiting the sky into dawn. He told her how, as a young recruit, he had been able to list nearly all the constellations, had taken some pride in it, had watched them disappear slowly at daybreak, to enjoy the magic of their reappearance hours later, but that when the war started he couldn’t look for more than a minute at a night sky without hearing the distant hum of an enemy plane. ‘It’s spoilt for me now,’ he said. ‘I find it easier not to look.’

She told him how the exploding shells in the Pacific mimicked the colours of the dawn, and how, on night duty, she would watch through the window flap of her ward tent, wondering at man’s ability to subvert nature. You could see a strange beauty even in those colours, she said. War – or perhaps nursing – had taught her to see it in just about anything. ‘It’ll come back, you know,’ she said. ‘You just have to give it time.’ Her voice was low, consoling. He thought of her uttering similar sentiments to the wounded men she tended, and wished, perversely, that he had been among them.

‘Have you served on this ship for long?’

It took him a minute to focus on what she was saying.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Most of us were on Indomitable. But she was sunk at the end of the war. Those of us who got out ended up on the Victoria.’

Such a few tidy words, well rehearsed now. They did little to convey the chaos and horror of the final hours of that ship, the bombs, the screams and the holds that turned into geysers of fire.

She turned her face full towards him. ‘Did you lose many?’