Ship of Brides Read online

  ‘I was going to outline a couple of rules,’ he said, shifting on his leg. He faced the marines, in a neat, silent row to his left. ‘To make a few things clear about this evening. But I’ve decided it’s too hot. And if you don’t have enough common sense not to fall off the side there’s not a lot of hope for you, whatever I say. So I’ll ask you, as ever, not to distract the men from their work. And I hope this helps you get a better night’s sleep.’

  His words were met with a cheerful swell of chatter from the women and a round of applause. He could see the gratitude on some faces, and felt an unfamiliar swelling of something in him. His mouth twitched into a smile.

  ‘Just make sure it’s only marines who are allowed up here,’ he said to Dobson. And then, while his good mood stalled the pain in his leg, he made his way stiffly towards his rooms.

  That night, Frances thought afterwards, had been the high point of the voyage. Not just for her but for most of them. Perhaps it was something about them all being together, about the freedom and sweet release of the open sea and the sky after the days of encroaching heat and deepening ill-temper, that lifted their spirits. The openness of the deck made them all, briefly, equal, prevented the cliques that made being among large numbers of women such a trial.

  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?’

  ‘A good few. Captain lost his nephew.’

  She turned to where the captain had stood below the bridge, hours earlier, immaculate in his tropical rig, consulting a chart. ‘Everyone has lost someone,’ she said, almost to herself.

  He had asked her about the prisoners-of-war, and had listene
d to her litany of injuries, of those patients she had cared for and lost. He didn’t ask her how she had coped. Those who had lived through it rarely did, she remarked. It was unimportant, once you had experienced the fierce gratitude of simply being alive.

  ‘Quite a thing to choose to do,’ he said.

  ‘Do you really think any of us had a choice?’

  It was at that moment, as he looked at her pale, serious face, heard in her reply the determination not to glean even the smallest advantage from other people’s suffering that he knew his feelings for her could no longer be considered appropriate. ‘I – I – no . . .’ The shock of this knowledge drove his voice from him, and he shook his head mutely. He found his thoughts suddenly, inappropriately, drawn to his last shore leave, and he felt exposed, flooded with shame.

  ‘We all have to find some way,’ she said, ‘of atoning.’

  You? he wanted to say incredulously. You didn’t start this war. You were not responsible for the damage, the torn limbs, the suffering. You are one of the good things. You are one of the reasons we all kept going. You, of all people, of all these women lying here, have nothing to atone for.

  Perhaps it was the strangeness of the hour, or that her bare shoulders, in the encroaching light, glowed like something ethereal. Perhaps it was the simple fact that he had not exchanged for what seemed like years a single word that was not smothered with uniformed bluff and bravery. He wanted to crack open like the dawn in front of her, to reveal himself, faults and all, and be absolved by her warmth and understanding. He wanted to scream at her husband – no doubt some stupid, wisecracking engineer, who, even as they spoke, might be straightening his trousers as he crept out of some Far-Eastern brothel, exchanging sly winks with his messmates – ‘Do you know what you’ve got? Do you understand?’

  He thought briefly, insanely, that he might try to put at least some of this into words. And then, at the corner of his eye, Captain Highfield appeared on the bridge. Following his gaze, she turned and watched as the captain consulted two officers. He gestured towards the aircraft, then straightened up as they talked to him rapidly. From their raised voices, something seemed to be up.

  He drew back reluctantly from Frances. ‘I’d better go and find out what’s going on,’ he said. He held the warmth of her answering smile close to him for the twenty-four strides it took to join the others.

  Several minutes later he returned. ‘They’re going over the side,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The planes. Captain’s decided we all need more room. He’s just got permission from London to put them overboard.’

  ‘But there’s nothing wrong with them!’

  His voice bubbled uncharacteristically. The long night had caught him, choked him, and now, releasing him, left him emotional. ‘The bigwigs who oversee the Lend-lease Agreement are okay with it. But he’s . . . he’s not the kind of captain to make decisions like that.’ He shook his head, disbelieving.

  ‘But he’s right,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s over. Let the sea take them.’

  And as dawn broke, touching the near naked bodies with its cold blue light, a few of the girls woke, pulling their sheets round them, watching mutely with sleep-filled eyes as silently, one by one, the aircraft were wheeled to the edge by pairs of engineers. Accompanied by the minimum of instruction, so as not to wake those sleeping, the planes faced the skies for the last time, wings folded upwards, some still scarred and scorched from airborne victories. They waited patiently while their last details were read out and checked off. Then they teetered on the edge, spending the shortest moment in mid-air before they disappeared on their concluding flight, the splash of each impact surprisingly muted as they drifted down, silently shifting against the currents of the Indian Ocean, down, down towards a final, gentle landing on some unknown unseen sea bed.

  13

  My brother brought back an English bride. Before they landed, she was lauded up to the skies as being beautiful, accomplished, helpful and brilliant . . .; but instead of that we found an ugly, brown-necked, red-complexioned, lazy hussy who had not a good word to say about anyone or anything in this country . . . Speaking personally it was a sorry day for me when an imported minx landed in our family.

  Letter to Melbourne’s Truth newspaper, 1919

  Twenty-two days

  Dear Mum,

  This is a hard letter to write. I guess I’ve put off writing it for as long as I could. But you probably know without me having to explain what it is I want to tell you I have done, and how I’ve carried it round ever since. I’m not proud of myself, Mum. I gave myself all sorts of reasons to convince myself I was doing the right thing. But I’m not sure who I thought I was protecting – you or myself . . .

  My dearest love,

  It’s very strange trying to compose this letter, knowing that in all likelihood by the time you get it we will already be in each other’s arms. But this voyage is starting to stretch, and I feel increasingly desperate, stuck out here in the middle of the ocean, to maintain some kind of contact. To at least talk to you, even though you might not be able to listen. I suppose some of these brides are more self-sufficient than I am, able to cope with endless days of absent time. But to me, every minute I spend without you is far too long, and infinitely worthless . . .

  Sometimes the unspoken conversations taking place on the Victoria became clamorous. Now, half-way through the voyage, the weight of these one-sided exchanges hung heavy in the air as brides reread and composed correspondence, trying to express their longing, confiding their fears to their families or chiding their men for lack of emotion. In Cabin 3G two brides sat side by side on their bunks, each buried in thought as they committed their own pens to the tissue-thin Navy-issue writing-paper.

  Occasionally, through the partially open door, the sound of passing footsteps was accompanied by a burst of laughter or a murmured conversation, punctuated by discreet exclamations of surprise. The heat of the previous days had broken a little with the arrival of a short storm in the early hours of that morning, and the inhabitants of the brides’ cabins had become active again: many were out enjoying the fresher air. None of which was heard apparently by the remaining occupants of Cabin 3G, both of whom were lost in a one-sided conversation with persons far from the confines of the Victoria.

  . . . darling, in the circumstances it feels rather silly to be writing these words. So perhaps I shall use them simply to say how much I adore you, and how glad I am that this baby is ours. That we will bring him or her up together, and not separated, as we have been, by endless stretches of water. That I can’t think of a more wonderful father than I am sure you will be.

  Sometimes you can feel something so bad, be so caught up in your own unhappiness, that it’s hard to see what’s right. Even harder to do it.

  Still, I realised something last night: that even after everything that happened you would never have done what I did. That the whole point was, you would have just wanted people to be as happy as they could possibly be. It’s hard even to write that, without feeling ashamed sorry.

  ‘Avice,’ said Margaret, ‘do you have any blotting paper?’

  ‘Here,’ said Avice, stretching downwards. ‘You can have that sheet. I’ve got plenty.’ She adjusted her skirt as she settled down again, her free hand reaching absently to pat her stomach.

  . . . so that’s why I’m going to write to Letty, and tell her the truth. That Dad, while he’ll never love anyone like he loved you, deserves to have a bit of company. He deserves to be looked after. I’ve finally realised I don’t have to protect some perfect image I have of the two of you. I don’t have to feel angry with her for being in love with him all these years. I can just feel sad for her that she wasted them on someone she knew she couldn’t have. Didn’t even try to have.

  I know you’ll agree with this, Mum. But I think Letty, after all her years alone, deserves to be loved.

  ‘I’m going upstairs to sit on the deck for a bit. Are you all right if I
leave you with Maudie?’

  Avice glanced up at Margaret, who was standing by the door, her completed letter in her hand. She looked, Avice thought, a little red round the eyes. Mind you, with that awful blue dress, which she must have worn for the last ten days, and those swollen ankles, her eyes were probably the least of her worries. ‘Sure,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not so bad up there now the heat has died down a bit.’

  Avice nodded and, as the door closed behind Margaret, she resumed writing.

  It’s very odd, perhaps you might even find it silly, but do you know what, Ian? I have felt strangely nervous about telling you. I know you’re not desperately keen on surprises, but this is a truly special sort of surprise, isn’t it? Of course it would have been nice for us to have a little time to ourselves, but once the baby is born we can sort out a nurse for it, and you and I can go on being just how we were in Australia – except with a darling little baby to love too. I know some men rather miss the attention of their wives once the little ones come along but, darling, I want to assure you that I AM NOT ONE OF THOSE. No baby would ever come between you and I. You are first in my heart, and always will be. The important thing is for us to be together. That’s what you always said to me. I hold those thoughts close to my heart every minute of every day. The important thing is for us to be together.

  Your Avice

  Avice lay back on her bunk, listening to the distant thrum of the ship’s engines, the occasional breaking in of the Tannoy, the shrieking of other girls engaged in some activity above. She placed her sealed letter on her chest, holding it to her with both hands, and thought back.

  The checkout time would normally have been eleven a.m., but it being wartime, and needs being what they were, she had known that even at a quarter past two in the afternoon they were unlikely to be disturbed by the maid. The Melbourne Flower Garden Hotel, like many local establishments, did a brisk trade these days in what were known as ‘extended checkouts’. So extended, in fact, were checkout times that quite frequently the couples did not bother staying at the hotel overnight. It was entirely possible that many were not married. Why else would they require a hotel room? The explanations of ‘wives’ coming into town especially to meet their husbands’ ships sounded unconvincing even to the most naïve ears. But with so many troops in town, and need being what it was, the hotel owner had been canny enough to grasp that flexibility and a blind eye would keep the dollars rolling in.