Ship of Brides Page 34

  ‘It’s about your – your life before you came aboard. I’m afraid I have to bring this up, uncomfortable as it may be for you. For the welfare of my men and for the good conduct of everyone on board, I have to know whether these – these rumours are true.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Can I assume from your silence that they are not . . . untrue?’

  When she failed to answer him a third time, he felt ill-at-ease. This, allied with his physical discomfort, caused him to become impatient. He stood, perhaps better to impress her with his authority, and moved round the desk.

  ‘I’m not trying to deliberately persecute you, Miss—’

  ‘Mrs,’ she said. ‘Mrs Mackenzie.’

  ‘But rules are rules, and as it stands I cannot allow women of – your sort to travel on a ship full of men.’

  ‘My sort.’

  ‘You know what I’m saying. It’s difficult enough carrying so many women at close quarters. I’ve looked into your – your circumstances, and I can’t allow your presence to destabilise my ship.’ God only knew what the governor of Gibraltar would say if he knew of the presence of this particular passenger. Let alone his wife. They had only just stopped shuddering at the thought of those gambolling German prisoners.

  She stared at her shoes for some time. Then she raised her head. ‘Captain Highfield, are you putting me off the ship?’ Her voice was low and calm.

  He was half relieved that she had said it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I feel I have no choice.’

  She appeared to be considering something. Her demeanour suggested that there was almost nothing surprising in what he had said to her. But in the faintest narrowing of her eyes there was contempt for it too.

  This was not what he had expected. Anger, perhaps. Histrionics, like the other two unfortunates. He had posted the rating outside in anticipation.

  ‘You are free to say something,’ he said, when the silence became oppressive. ‘In your defence, I mean.’

  There was a lengthy pause. Then she placed her hands in her lap. ‘In my defence . . . I am a nurse. A nursing sister, to be more precise. I have been a nurse for four and a half years. In that time I’ve treated several thousand men, some of whose lives I saved.’

  ‘It’s a very good thing – that you managed to—’

  ‘Become a worthwhile human being?’ Her tone was sharp.

  ‘That’s not what—’

  ‘But I can’t, can I? Because I am never to be allowed to forget my so-called past. Not even several thousand miles distant from it.’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting that—’

  She looked at him directly. He thought she might have squared her shoulders.

  ‘I know quite well what you were suggesting, Captain. That my service record is the least important thing about me. Like most of the occupants of this ship, you choose to determine my character by the first thing you heard. And then act upon it.’

  She smoothed her dress over her knees and took a deep breath, as if she were having some trouble containing herself. ‘What I was going to say, Captain Highfield, before you interrupted me, is that I have treated in my career probably several thousand men, some of whom had been terrorised and physically brutalised. Some of whom were my enemies. Many of whom were only half alive. And not one,’ she paused for breath. ‘Not one of them treated me with the lack of consideration you have just shown.’

  He had not expected her to be so composed. So articulate.

  He had not expected to find himself the accused.

  ‘Look,’ his tone was conciliatory, ‘I can’t pretend I don’t know about you.’

  ‘No, and neither can I, apparently. I can only try to lead a useful life. And not think too hard about things that may have been out of my control.’

  They remained in an uneasy silence. His mind raced as he tried to work out how to deal with this extraordinary situation. Outside, he could hear muffled conversation and lowered his voice, sensing a way to salvage their dignity. ‘Look – are you saying that what happened wasn’t your doing? That you might have been . . . more sinned against than sinning?’

  If she would plead for herself, make a promise about her future conduct, then perhaps . . .

  ‘I’m saying that it’s none of your concern either way.’ Her knuckles were white with some contained emotion. ‘The only things that are your business, Captain, are my profession, which, as you’ll know from your passenger lists and my service record, should you have cared to look at it, is nurse, my marital status and my behaviour on board your ship, which, I think you’ll find, has met all your requirements for decorum.’

  Her voice had gained strength. The tips of her pale ears had gone pink, the only sign of any underlying lack of composure.

  He realised, with some bewilderment, that he felt as if he were the one in the wrong.

  He glanced down at the papers that detailed the procedures for putting off brides. ‘Put her off at Port Said,’ the Australian Red Cross supervisor had said. ‘She might have to wait a bit for a boat back. Then again, a lot of them disappear in Egypt.’ Her ‘them’ had contained an unmistakeable note of contempt.

  God, it was a mess. A bloody mess. He wished he’d never embarked on the conversation and opened this can of worms. But she had entered the system now. His hands were tied.

  Perhaps recognising something in his expression, she got to her feet. Her hair, scraped back from her forehead, emphasised the high, almost Slavic bones of her face, the shadows under her eyes. He wondered briefly whether before she left, she would try to hit him, as the little one had, and then felt guilty for having thought it. ‘Look, Mrs Mackenzie, I—’

  ‘I know. You’d like me to leave.’

  He was struggling for something to say, something that might appropriately convey the right mixture of authority and regret.

  She was half-way towards the door, when she said, ‘Do you want me to look at your leg?’

  His final words stalled on his lips. He blinked.

  ‘I’ve seen you limping. When you thought you were alone. You might as well know that I used to sit out on the flight deck at night.’

  Highfield was now completely wrongfooted. He found he had moved his leg behind him. ‘I don’t think that’s—’

  ‘I won’t touch you, if that will make you more comfortable.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my leg.’

  ‘Then I won’t trouble you.’

  They stood across the office from each other. Neither moved. There was nothing in her gaze that spoke of invitation.

  ‘I’ve not . . . I’ve not mentioned it to anyone,’ he found himself saying.

  ‘I’m fairly good at keeping secrets,’ she said, her eyes on his face.

  He sat down heavily on his chair and drew up his trouser leg. He hadn’t liked to look too closely at it for some days.

  She was briefly disarmed. Stood back, then stepped forward and examined it closely. ‘It’s clearly infected.’ She gestured to his leg, as if asking him whether he minded, then placed her hands upon it, tracing the wound’s length, the swollen red skin round it. ‘Is your temperature raised?’

  ‘I’ve felt better,’ he conceded.

  She studied it for several minutes. He realised – with something approaching shame – that he had not flinched when she touched his skin. ‘I think you may have osteomyelitis, an infection that has spread into the bone. This should be drained, and you need penicillin.’

  ‘Do you have some?’

  ‘No, but Dr Duxbury should.’

  ‘I don’t want him involved.’

  She expressed no surprise. He wondered if something in all this smacked of madness. He could not rid his mind of her startled expression when she had first seen his leg. And how she had immediately concealed it.

  ‘You need medical help,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want Duxbury told,’ he repeated.

  ‘Then I’ve given you my professional opinion, Captain, and I respect your right t
o ignore it.’

  She got up and wiped her hands on her trousers. He asked her to wait, then moved past her and opened the door. He summoned the rating from the corridor.

  The boy stepped in, his gaze flickering between the captain and the woman before him. ‘Take Mrs Mackenzie here to the dispensary,’ Highfield said. ‘She is to fetch some items.’

  She hesitated, apparently waiting for some proviso, some warning. None came.

  He held out his hand with the key. When she took it from him, she made sure her fingers did not touch his.

  The needle went into his leg, the fine slither of metal sliding mechanically in and out of his flesh as it drew out the foul liquid within. Despite the pain of the procedure, Highfield felt the anxiety that had plagued him start to dissipate.

  ‘You need another dose of penicillin in about six hours. Then one a day. A double dose to start with to push your system into fighting the infection. And when you get to England you must go straight to your doctor. It’s possible he’ll want you in hospital.’ She returned to the wound. ‘But you’re lucky. I don’t think it’s gangrenous.’

  She said this in a quiet, unemotional tone, declining to look at his face for most of it. Finally, she placed the last of the gamgee tissue dressing on his leg, and sat back on her heels so that he could pull down his trouser leg. She wore the same khaki slacks and white shirt that he had seen her in on the day she had accompanied the younger bride to his office.

  He sighed with relief at the prospect of a pain-free night. She was gathering together the medical equipment she had brought from the dispensary. ‘You should keep some of this here,’ she said, eyes still on the floor. ‘You’ll need to change that dressing tomorrow.’ She scribbled some instructions on a piece of paper. ‘Keep your leg elevated whenever you’re alone. And try to keep it dry. Especially in the humidity. You can take the painkilling tablets two at a time.’ She put the dressing and tape on his desk, then replaced the lid on his pen.

  ‘If it starts to worsen you’ll have to see a surgeon. And this time you can’t afford to delay.’

  ‘I’m going to say there has been a misunderstanding.’ Her head lifted. ‘A case of mistaken identity. If you could spare some time during the rest of the voyage to administer those penicillin injections I would be grateful.’

  She stared at him, raised herself to her feet. She looked, perhaps for the first time that day, startled. She swallowed hard. ‘I didn’t do it for that,’ she said. He nodded.

  ‘I know.’

  He stood up, testing his weight gingerly on the injured leg. Then he held out his hand. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘Mrs Mackenzie . . . Sister Mackenzie.’

  She stared at it for a minute. Given the astonishing composure she had shown so far, when she took it and looked up, he was surprised to see tears in her eyes.

  19

  For others the ordeal left ineradicable scars – the excoriating cold, the fear and the proximity of untimely and senseless death mixed with the sheer degradation of life in a small, weather-battered warship – to kindle a lifelong abhorrence of war.

  Richard Woodman, Arctic Convoys 1941–45

  Thirty-five days (one week to Plymouth)

  In the anonymous space at the back of the lecture room, Joe Junior shifted restlessly, perhaps feeling unfairly confined by the limitations of his environment. Margaret, looking down on the dome of her stomach, watching her tattered notebook ride the seismic wave of his movement, like a little craft on water, thought she knew how he felt. For weeks, time on this ship had seemed to stall. She had felt a desperate need to see Joe, and a deepening frustration with the way the days crawled by. Now that they were in European waters, time was speeding past, leaving her in turmoil.

  She was grotesque, she thought. Her belly was hugely swollen, the pale skin traversed by purple tributaries. She could squeeze her feet into only a stretched, gritty pair of sandals. Her face, never slender, now peered back at her from the mirror in the communal bathroom as a perfect moon. How could Joe still want me? she asked herself. He married a lithe, active girl who could run as fast as him, who could race him on horseback across the endless green acres of the station. A girl whose firm, taut body, unclothed, had moved him to a point beyond speech.

  Now he would find himself tethered to a fat, lumpen, heavy-footed sow, who sat down breathless after the shortest flight of stairs. Whose breasts, pale and veiny, flopped and leaked milk. A sow who disgusted even herself. She was no longer reassured by the easy affection of their conversation a few weeks ago – how could she be? He hadn’t seen her new appearance.

  She shifted on the little wooden seat and breathed out a silent ‘oh’ of discomfort. Today’s lecture had been entitled ‘Things Your Men May Have Seen’. Despite the title, it contained only repeated references to ‘unmentionable horrors’, which the speaker had evidently considered too unmentionable to describe. What was important, the welfare officer said, was not to press your husband on what had happened to him. Most men, history had shown, were better off not dwelling on things but simply Getting On With It. They didn’t want some woman haranguing them to tell her everything. What men needed was someone to distract them with gaiety, who could remind them of the joys of what they had been fighting for.

  The way this man talked made Margaret feel for the first time that she and Joe were not partners, as she had assumed, but that there was, by dint of her sex and his experiences, a huge abyss between them. Joe had only once hinted at his personal canon of horrors: his friend Adie had been killed in the Pacific while he was standing just feet away from Joe on deck, and she had seen him blink furiously at the fine tide that rose in his eyes. She had not pushed him for details, not because she had felt this was something he should endure in private but because she was Australian. Of good farming stock. And the sight of a man’s eyes filled with tears, even an Irishman’s (and they all knew how emotional they could get), made her feel a little peculiar.

  There would be added strains, the welfare officer had said, with them having come from very different continents. There was little doubt that that would be an extra pressure on them, no matter how warm the welcome they received from their British in-laws. He suggested the girls find themselves a friend within the family. Or perhaps exchange addresses with some of their new friends on board so that they had someone to talk to if they were particularly concerned.

  But they might find, for a few months, that their husband became a little short-tempered, snappy, at times. ‘Before you censure him, perhaps take a moment to consider that there may be other reasons for his outburst. That he may have remembered something he doesn’t want to burden you with. And perhaps before you loose your tongue in response, you might consider what your husband has done in the service of his country, and of yourselves. We have an expression in England.’ Here the welfare officer paused, and let his gaze span the little room. ‘“Stiff upper lip”. It’s what has kept our Empire strong these last years. I’d advocate that you use it often.’

  The marine officer’s attendant had motioned to him twice now to help clear the wardroom. It took Jones’s urgent ‘C’mon, man, shake a leg,’ to rouse Nicol from his reverie.

  Around him the officers had finished their meal and were retiring to smoke pipes and read letters or old newspapers. There had been a long-running joke throughout lunch about the state of Victoria’s engines, and an open book on whether they were going to last until Plymouth. Another parallel joke, the subject of much ribald discussion, concerned three ratings who had been informed that they were to appear before the Admiralty Interview Board to try to become officers, and the possible answers that one would give, a young man widely considered to have the intelligence and demeanour of a mule.

  ‘You half asleep, man?’ Jones virtually shoved him through into the wardroom annexe. ‘The XO had his eye on you through the toasts – you were standing there like a sack of spuds. At one stage I thought you were going to stick your hands in your bloody pockets.’

 
; Nicol was unable to answer. Standing to attention during the toasts would normally have been reflexive to him. Like polishing his boots, or offering to go extra rounds. But strange things had happened to his sense of responsibility.

  He had been imagining her put off, and him following. During lunch he had allowed himself the daydream that her husband might send her a Not Wanted Don’t Come, then cursed himself for wishing that shame upon her.

  But he couldn’t help it. When he closed his eyes, he saw her watchful face. The brief, bright smile she had bestowed on him when they had danced. The feel of her waist, her hands resting lightly on him.

  Who had she married? Had she told him of her past? Worse, had the man been part of it? There seemed no way to ask her without implying that he, like the rest of them, was entitled to some sort of opinion on her life. What right had he to ask any of it?

  These thoughts made his eyes screw shut against images he didn’t want to own. In his mess the men, familiar with temporary visitations from war demons, allowed him a wide berth. They came back to haunt a man occasionally, buzzing low, divebombing his mind and scorching it black. Perhaps I could tell her, he thought. I could explain a little of what I feel. Saying it might act like a pressure valve. She wouldn’t have to do anything about it.

  But even as the words formed in his mind, he knew he could not speak out. She had created a future for herself, found some stability. He had no right to say or do anything that might interfere with it.

  Last night he had stared up at the constellations that had once intrigued him, now cursing the conjunction of planets that had caused their paths to veer past each other at a point that might have redeemed them both. I could have made her happy, he thought. How could the unknown husband say the same? Or perhaps some selfish part of him just wanted to atone and diminish his own sense of guilt by being her saviour.

  It was this uncomfortable revelation that forced him to his conclusion, which prompted him to swap his shifts with Emmett and kept him, for the next few days, well away from her.