The Ship of Brides(69)
Author: Jojo Moyes

With an extravagant salute, Jones leant back again. By the time Nicol had worked out an appropriately pithy response, Jones had fallen asleep, a lit Senior Service hanging loosely from his hand.

The men were boxing on the flight deck. Someone had set up a ring where the Corsairs had sat and in it Dennis Tims was battering several shades of something unrepeatable out of one of the seamen. His naked upper body a taut block of sinewy muscle, he moved without grace or rhythm around the ring. He was an automaton, a machine of destruction, his fists pounding bluntly until the darting, weaving young seaman succumbed and was hauled unconscious through the ropes and away. Four rounds in, there was such a terrible inevitability to his victories that the assembled men and brides were finding it hard to raise the enthusiasm to clap.

Frances, who had found it difficult to watch them, stood with her back to them. Tims, punching, was too close a reminder of the night of Jean’s ‘incident’. There was something in the power of his swing, in the brutal set of his jaw as he ploughed into the pale flesh presented to him that made her feel cold, even in this heat. She had wondered, when she and Jean had sat down, whether they should move away, for the younger girl’s sake. But Jean’s benign interest demonstrated that she had been too drunk to know what Tims had seen – or for that matter, what anyone else had done.

‘Hope they don’t get too hot and bothered,’ Jean said now, folding herself neatly into the spot beside Margaret. She seemed to find it difficult to sit still: she had spent the last hour wandering backwards and forwards between the ringside and their deck-chairs. ‘Have you heard? The water’s run out.’

Margaret looked at her. ‘What?’

‘Not drinking water, but the pump isn’t working properly and there’s no washing – not hair, clothes or anything – until they’ve mended it. Emergency rations only. Can you imagine? In this weather!’ She fanned herself with her hand. ‘I tell you there’s a bloody riot in the bathrooms. That Irene Carter might think she’s a right lady, but when her shower stopped you should have heard the language. Would have made old Dennis blush.’

Over the past week or so, Jean had recovered her good humour, so much so that her ceaseless and largely inconsequential chatter had taken on a new momentum. ‘You know Avice is taking Irene on for Queen of the Victoria? They’ve got the Miss Lovely Legs competition this afternoon. Avice has been down to the cases and persuaded the officer to let her get out her best pair of pumps. Four-inch heels in dark green satin to match her bathing suit.’

‘Oh.’

Tims followed an upper cut with a left hook. Then again. And again.

‘Are you all right, Maggie?’

Frances handed Margaret the ice-cream she had been proffering, unnoticed, for several seconds, exchanging a brief glance with Jean as she did so.

‘It – it’s not the baby, is it?’

Margaret turned to them. ‘No, I’m fine. Honest.’

She looked neither of them in the eye.

‘Oh, Dennis is in again. I’m going to see if anyone wants to have a wager with me. Mind you, I can’t see that anyone’s going to offer odds against him. Not at this rate.’ Jean got up, straightened her skirt, and skipped over to the other onlookers.

Margaret and Frances sat in silence with their ices. In the distance, a tanker moved across the horizon, and they followed its steady progress until it was no longer visible.

‘What’s that?’

Margaret looked at the letter in her hand, evidently having realised that the name of the addressee was showing.

Frances said nothing, but there was a question in her eyes. ‘Were you . . . going to throw it into the water?’

Margaret gazed out at the turquoise waves.

‘It . . . would be a nice thing to do. I had a patient once whose sweetheart got bombed, back in Germany. He wrote her a goodbye letter and we put it into a bottle and dropped it over the side of the hospital ship.’

‘I was going to post it,’ Margaret said.

Frances looked back at the envelope, checked that she’d read the name correctly. Then she turned to Margaret, perplexed. Behind her, voices were raised in shock at some misdemeanour in the ring, but she kept her eyes on the woman beside her.

‘I lied,’ said Margaret. ‘I let you think she was dead but she’s not. She left us. She’s been gone nearly two and a half years.’

‘Your mother?’

‘Yup.’ She waved the letter. ‘I don’t know why I brought it up here.’

Then Margaret began to talk, at first quietly, and then as if she no longer cared who heard.

It had been a shock. That much was an understatement. They had come home one day to find dinner bubbling on the stove, the shirts neatly pressed over the range, the floors mopped and polished and a note. She couldn’t take it any more, she had written. She had waited until Margaret’s brothers were home from the war, and Daniel had hit fourteen and become a man, and now she considered her job done. She loved them all, but she had to claw back a little bit of life for herself, while she still had some left. She hoped they would understand, but she expected they wouldn’t.

She had got Fred Bridgeman to pick her up and drop her at the station, and she had gone, taking with her only a suitcase of clothes, forty-two dollars in savings, and two of the good photographs of the children from the front parlour.

‘Mr Leader at the ticket office said she’d got the train to Sydney. From there she could have gone anywhere. We figured she’d come back when she was ready. But she never did. Daniel took it hardest.’

Frances took Margaret’s hand.

‘Afterwards, I suppose, we could all have seen the signs. But you don’t look, do you? Mothers are meant to be exhausted, fed up. They’re meant to shout a lot and then apologise. They’re meant to get headaches. I suppose we all thought she was part of the furniture.’

‘Did you ever hear from her?’

‘She wrote a few times, and Dad wrote begging her to come back, but when she didn’t, he stopped. Pretty quickly, come to think of it. He couldn’t cope with the idea of her not loving him any more. Once they accepted she wasn’t coming back, the boys wouldn’t write at all. So . . . he just . . . they . . . behaved as if she had died. It was easier than admitting the truth.’ She paused. ‘She’s only written once this year. Maybe I’m a reminder of something she wants to forget, guilt she doesn’t want to feel. Sometimes I think the kindest thing I could do would be to let her go.’ She turned the envelope in her free hand.