The Ship of Brides(78)
Author: Jojo Moyes

‘What? To her bludger? Manager’s prize girl, she was! And now look! Can you credit it? She’s turned into Florence Nightingale!’ His burst of incredulous laughter followed Frances’s swift footsteps all the way out of the hatch and back out along the passageway.

15

There was one girl from England,

Susan Summers was her name,

For fourteen years transported was,

We all well knew the same.

Our planter bought her freedom

And he married her out of hand,

Good usage then she gave to us

Upon Van Diemen’s Land.

from ‘Van Diemen’s Land’,

Australian folk song

Australia, 1939

Frances had checked the Arnott’s biscuit tin four times before Mr Radcliffe came. She had also checked the back of the cutlery drawer, in the pot behind the screen door and under the mattress in what had once, many years previously, been her parents’ room. She had asked her mother several times where the money was, and in her mother’s snoring, alcohol-fumed reply the answer was obvious.

But not to Mr Radcliffe. ‘So, where is it?’ he had said, smiling. The same way that a shark smiles when it opens its mouth to bite.

‘I’m real sorry. I don’t know what she’s done with it.’ Her ankle was hooked behind the door to restrict his view inside, but Mr Radcliffe leant to one side and gazed through the screen to where her mother lolled in the armchair. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

‘She’s not very well,’ she said, pulling at her skirt awkwardly. ‘Perhaps when she wakes up she’ll be able to tell me.’

Behind him, she could see two neighbours walking along the street. They murmured something, their eyes trained on her. She didn’t have to hear the words to know the tenor of their conversation. ‘If you want I could stop by later with it?’

‘What? Like your mum did last week? And the week before that?’ He brushed at a non-existent crease in the front of his trousers. ‘I don’t suppose there’s enough left in her purse to buy you a loaf of bread.’

She said nothing. The way he kept hovering, he seemed to expect her to invite him in. But she didn’t want Mr Radcliffe, with his expensive clothes and polished shoes, to sit down in the squalor of their front room. Not before she’d had a chance to put it right.

They faced each other on the porch, locked in an uneasy waiting game.

‘You’ve not been around here for a while.’ It wasn’t quite a question.

‘I’ve been staying with my aunt May.’

‘Oh, yes. She passed on, didn’t she? Cancer, wasn’t it?’

Frances could answer now without her eyes filling. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was there . . . to help her for a bit.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss. You probably know your mother didn’t do too good while you were gone.’ Mr Radcliffe glanced past her through the door, and she fought the urge to close it a little more.

‘She’s . . . dropped behind on her payments. Not just with me. You’ll get no tick at Green’s now, or Mayhew’s.’

‘I’ll manage,’ said Frances.

He turned to the gleaming motor-car that stood in the road. Two boys were peering at themselves in the wing mirror. ‘Your mother was a pretty woman when she worked for me. That’s what the drink does to you.’

She held his gaze.

‘I suppose there’s not a lot I can tell you about her.’

Still she said nothing.

Mr Radcliffe shifted on his feet, then checked his watch. ‘How old are you, Frances?’ he said.

‘Fifteen.’

He studied her, as if assessing her. Then he sighed, as if he were about to do something against his better judgement. ‘Look, I tell you what, I’ll let you work at the hotel. You can wash dishes. Do a bit of cleaning. I don’t suppose you can rely on your mother to keep you. Don’t let me down, mind, or you and she will be out on your ears.’ He had been back there, shooing away the boys before she’d had a chance to thank him.

She had known Mr Radcliffe for most of her life. Most people in Aynsville did: he was the owner of the only hotel, and landlord of several clapboard properties. She could still remember the days when her mother, before the booze tightened its grip, had disappeared in the evening to work at the hotel bar, and Aunt May had looked after her. Later Aunt May rued the day she had told Frances’s mother to go work there – ‘But in a two-horse town like this, love, you got to take the jobs when they come, right?’

Frances’s own experience of the hotel was rather better. For the first year, anyway. Every day, shortly after nine, she would report for work in the back kitchen, alongside a near-silent Chinese man who scowled and raised a huge knife at her if she didn’t wash and slice the vegetables to his satisfaction. She would clean the kitchens, slapping at the floors with a black-tendrilled mop, help prepare food until four, then move on to washing up. Her hands chapped and split with the scalding water; her back and neck ached from stooping at the little sink. She learnt to keep her eyes lowered from the women who sat around bad-temperedly in the mid-afternoon with little to do but drink and bitch at each other. But she had enjoyed earning money and having a little control over what had been a chaotic existence.

Mr Radcliffe kept the rent and paid her a little over, just enough to cover food and household expenses. She had bought herself a new pair of shoes, and her mother a cream blouse with pale blue embroidery. The kind of blouse she could imagine a different sort of mother wearing. Her mother had wept with gratitude, promised that, given a little time, she would be back on her feet. Frances could go away to college, perhaps, like May had promised. Get away from this stinking hole.

But then, freed of the responsibility of earning and even of keeping house, her mother had begun to drink more heavily. Occasionally she would come to the hotel bar and lean over the counter in her low-cut dresses. Inevitably, late into the evening, she would harangue the men around her, and the girls who worked there; she would swat at non-existent flies and shriek for Frances in tones that were both critical and self-pitying. Finally she would clatter into the kitchens to attack her daughter verbally for her failures – to dress nicely, to earn her keep, for allowing herself to be born and ruining her mother’s life – until Hun Li grabbed her in his huge arms and threw her out. Then he would scowl at Frances, as if her mother’s failures were her own. She didn’t attempt to defend her: she had worked out years before that there was little point.