Ship of Brides Read online

  ‘Oh, no . . .’

  Nicol tore his gaze from Frances to Jones-the-Welsh. The man was staring at her and shaking his head, bemused. Then a wicked smile flickered across his face.

  ‘What?’ said Nicol. He was following her towards the ladder and reached for the jacket he had slung over a tool case.

  ‘No . . . can’t be . . . never . . .’ Jones glanced behind him and suddenly located the man he apparently wanted to speak to. ‘Hey, Duckworth, are you thinking what I’m thinking? Queensland? It isn’t, is it?’ Frances had climbed up the ladder and was now walking towards the other girls, head down.

  ‘Saw it straight away,’ came the broad Cockney accent. ‘The old Rest Easy. You wouldn’t credit it, would you?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Avice, from above. ‘What’s he talking about?’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Jones-the-Welsh, and burst out laughing. ‘A nurse! Wait till we tell old Kenny! A nurse!’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about, Jones?’

  Jones’s face, when it met Nicol’s, held the same amused smile with which he greeted most of life’s great surprises, whether they were extra sippers, victories at sea or successful cheating at cards. ‘Your little nurse there, Nicol,’ he said, ‘used to be a brass.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Duckworth knows – we came across her at a club in Queensland, must be four, five years ago now.’

  His laughter, like his voice, carried over the noise of the engine to the ears of the exhausted men and the brides heading wearily out on to the walkway. Some had stopped, in response to Jones’s exclamation, and were listening.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, man.’ Nicol looked up at Frances, who was nearly at the hatch. She stared straight ahead, and then, perhaps at the end of some unseen internal struggle, allowed herself to glance down at him. In her eyes he saw resignation. He found he had gone cold.

  ‘But she’s married.’

  ‘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.

  In the face of their poverty, Frances could never work out how her mother acquired the money to get as drunk as she did.

  And then, one night, she disappeared – with the evening’s takings.

  Frances had been taking a five-minute break, seated on a bucket in the broom cupboard, eating a couple of slices of bread and margarine that Hun Li had left for her, when she heard the commotion. She had already put down her plate and stood up when Mr Radcliffe stormed in. ‘Where is she, the thieving whore?’

  Frances froze, wide-eyed. She already knew, with a familiar sinking feeling in her stomach, whom he was talking about.

  ‘She’s gone! And so has my bloody cash! Where is she?’

  ‘I – I don’t know,’ Frances had stammered.

  Mr Radcliffe, normally so urbane and gentlemanly, had become an enraged, puce-faced creature, his body somehow threatening to burst out of his shirt, his huge fists balled as if in an effort to contain himself. He had stared at her for what seemed like an eternity, apparently weighing up the possibility that she was telling the truth. She had thought, briefly, that she might wet herself with fear. Then he had gone, the door slamming behind him.

  They had found her two days later, unconscious, at the back of the butcher’s. There was no money, just a few empty bottles. Her shoes were missing. One evening that same week, Mr Radcliffe went round ‘to have a word with her’ then came back to the hotel to tell Frances that he and her mother had decided it might be best if she left town for a while. She was bad for business. Hardly anyone would give the Lukes credit. He had personally helped her out. ‘Just till she straightens herself out a bit,’ he said. ‘Though God only knows how long that’ll take.’

  Frances had been too shocked to react. When she arrived home that evening, took in the heavy silence of the little house, the bills sitting on the kitchen table, the note that failed to explain exactly where her mother was going, she had laid her head on her arms and stayed like that until, exhausted, she slept.

  It had been almost three months later that Mr Radcliffe had called her in. Her mother’s shadow had diminished; people in town had stopped murmuring to each other as she passed – some even said hello. Hun Li had been conciliatory – had made sure that there were scraps of beef and mutton in her dinner, that she had regular breaks. Once he had left her two oranges, although he later denied it and raised his cleaver in mock anger when she suggested it. The girls in the bar had asked if she was doing all right, had tweaked her plaits in a sisterly manner. One had offered her a drink when she finished her shift. She had refused, but was grateful. When another had popped her head round the kitchen door and asked her to nip up to his office, she had flinched, afraid that she was about to be accused of theft too. Like mother like daughter – that was what they said in the town. Blood would always out. But when she knocked and entered, Mr Radcliffe’s face was not angry.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. The way he looked at her seemed almost sympathetic. She sat. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave your house.’

  Before she could open her mouth to protest, he continued, ‘The war’s going to change things in Queensland. We’ve got troops headed up here and the town’s going to get busy. I’m told there are people coming in who can pay me a much better rent on it. Anyway, Frances, it doesn’t make sense for a young girl like you to be rattling around in it alone.’

  ‘I’ve kept up to date with my rent,’ said Frances. ‘I haven’t let you down once.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that, sweetheart, and I’m not the kind of man to turf you out on the street. You’ll move in here. You can have one of the rooms at the top, where Mo Haskins used to sleep – you know the one. And I’ll take a reduced rent for it, so you’ll have more money in your pocket. How’s that sound?’

  His confidence that she would be pleased with this arrangement was so overwhelming that she found it hard to say what she felt: that the house on Ridley Street was her home. That since her mother’s departure she had started to enjoy her independence, that she no longer felt as if she was teetering on the brink of disaster. And that she did not want to be indebted to him in the way this arrangement suggested.

  ‘I’d really rather stay in the house, Mr Radcliffe. I – I’ll work extra shifts to make up the rent.’

  Mr Radcliffe sighed. ‘I’d love to help you there, Frances, really I would. But when your mum took off with my takings she left a great big hole in my finances. A great – big – hole. A hole that I’m going to have to fill.’

  He stood up, and walked over to her. His hand on her shoulder felt immensely heavy.

  ‘But that’s what I like about you, Frances. You’re a grafter, not like your old mum. So, you’ll move in here. A girl like you shouldn’t spend the prime of her life worrying about the rent. You should be out, dressed up a bit, having fun. Besides, it’s not good for a young girl to be seen to be living on her own . . .’ He squeezed her shoulder. She felt immobilised. ‘No. You move your stuff in Saturday week and I’ll take care of everything else. I’ll send one of the boys over to give you a hand.’

  Afterwards, she realised that perhaps the girls had known something she couldn’t. That their sympathy, their friendliness and, in one case, hostility stemmed not from the fact that they lived under one roof, all girls together, as she had assumed, but from what they understood about her position.

  And that when Miriam, a short Jewish woman with hair that stretched to her waist, announced she would spend an afternoon helping her to smarten herself up a bit it had perhaps been the result not of girlish friendliness, but of someone else’s instruction.

  Either way Frances, unschooled in friendship, had found herself too intimidated by the unfamiliar attention to protest. At the end of the day, when Miriam had set her hair, pulled tight the waistband of the deep blue dress she had altered to fit her and presented her to Mr Radcliffe, boasting about the transformation, Frances had assumed she should be grateful.

  ‘Well, look at you,’ Mr Radcliffe said, puffing at his cigarette. ‘Who’d have thought, eh, Miriam?’

  ‘Doesn’t scrub up too bad, does she?’

  Frances felt her cheeks burn under their scrutiny and the makeup. She fought the urge to cover her chest with folded arms.

  ‘Good enough to eat. In fact, I think our little Frances has been wasted on old Hun Li, don’t you? I’m sure we can find her something more decorative to do than bottle-washing.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Frances. ‘Really. I’m very happy working with Mr Hun.’

  ‘Sure you are, sweetheart, and very fine work you do too. But looking at how darn pretty you’ve got, I think you’re more use to me out front. So, from now on you’ll serve drinks. Miriam here will show you the ropes.’

  She felt, as she so often did, outmanoeuvred. As if, despite her supposedly adult position in the world, there were too many people who could make decisions on her behalf. And if she had caught something in Miriam’s glance that made her feel something else, something vaguely disconcerting, then even she wouldn’t have been able to articulate what exactly that was.

  She should be grateful. She should be grateful that Mr Radcliffe had given her the pretty attic room at a price far cheaper than she could have afforded. She should be grateful that he was taking care of her, when neither of her parents had had the good sense to do it themselves. She should be grateful that he had paid her so much attention, that he had ordered those two good dresses for her when he discovered she hardly had an outfit to her name that wasn’t threadbare, that he took her out to dinner once a week and di
dn’t let anyone say anything bad about her mother in front of her, that he protected her from the attentions of the troops flooding into town. She should be grateful that someone found her as pretty as he did.

  She should have paid no attention to Hun Li when he took her aside one night and hissed at her in pidgin English that she should leave. Now. She wasn’t a stupid girl, no matter what the others were saying.

  So that first night when, instead of waving her off to bed, Mr Radcliffe invited her to come to his rooms after dinner, it was hard to say no. When she had pleaded tiredness, he had pulled such a sad face and said she couldn’t possibly leave him alone when he had entertained her all evening, could she? He had seemed so proud of the specially imported wine that it had been vital that she drink some too. Especially that second glass. And when he had insisted she sit on the sofa beside him instead of on the little chair, where she had been comfortable, it would have been rude to refuse.

  ‘You know, you’re actually a very beautiful girl, Frances,’ he had said. There had been something almost hypnotic about the way he kept murmuring it into her ear. About his broad hand, which, without her noticing, had been stroking her back, as if she were a baby. About the way her dress had slipped from her bare skin. Afterwards, when she had thought back, she knew she had hardly tried to stop him because she hadn’t realised, until it was too late, what she should have been stopping. And it hadn’t been so bad, had it? Because Mr Radcliffe cared about her. Like no one else cared. Mr Radcliffe would look after her.

  She might not be sure what it was she actually felt about him. But she knew she should be grateful.

  Frances stayed at the Rest Easy Hotel for three more months. For two of those months she and Mr Radcliffe (he never invited her to use his first name) settled into a twice-weekly routine of his nocturnal ‘visits’. Sometimes he would invite her to his rooms after he had taken her out to dinner. On a few occasions he arrived, unannounced, in hers. She didn’t like those times: he was often drunk, and once he had said almost nothing to her, simply opened her door and come crashing down on her so that she had felt like some kind of receptacle and stood, for hours after, trying to wash the smell of him from her skin.