The Fisherman's Girl

by Maggie Ford

  ‘Do come in, dear,’ his mother was saying, her voice adopting an odd sort of accent intended to sound nice. ‘Lovely to see you, dear. Annie is out. She shouldn’t be too long. She went off to Southend. Heaven knows why. She never said noth … anything about you coming today.’

  Everyone else discreetly withdrew; she and Alex sat in the tiny back room after Annie had confessed her lies to her mother, in tears of relief telling her everything. Now, sitting with Alex at the dining table, she wondered at her premature happiness.

  ‘I could not … I dared not contact you to let you know what’s been happening,’ Alex was saying. ‘My parents and I have been having row upon row. My mother in tears, my father in a rage.’

  Annie looked at him, her eyes sad with understanding, sad too with what she still saw as the inevitable as he told her of the hell he had gone through these past two weeks. His parents had no intention of meeting her no matter how he had argued and pleaded his case.

  It had come to her as she listened that it was all hopeless, that she must be brave and let go of him, but she couldn’t. She had just sat silently listening as he went on, his story sounding worse with every word.

  ‘My father is threatening to send me abroad.’

  Now she spoke. A father threatening to send his son, a grown man, abroad, sounded ludicrous. ‘How can he, Alex? You’re twenty-nine. He can’t do that.’

  His expression was grim. ‘He can, my love. That’s to say the company can. I’d be transferred to one of our overseas agencies for a spell. To sort out business on behalf of our company. I’ve done it before. The States, South America, South Africa. I enjoyed every minute of it, begged to go. Broadens the mind, makes a man of one. But how … He says he will arrange for me to go to India for an indefinite period and in time I will forget you.’

  ‘You don’t have to go.’ Indignation at such outrage against a grown man, son or not, gripped Annie. For the first time Alex smiled.

  ‘I do if I want to stay with the company. My father’s ultimatum. It’s tantamount to my being disinherited if I refuse under these circumstances, though he’d never cut me out of his will exactly, I know that. What it will mean is that he would ask me to resign from the company if I refuse and I’d be left to fend for myself.’

  Annie felt her muscles relax. ‘You could get a position anywhere. You know management and buying. We’d get along.’

  ‘What would I have to offer you then? We’d have nothing.’

  ‘We’d have each other.’

  ‘And when we have no money? I have always been in the family business. I know no other work.’

  ‘You could do what you’re doing now, but with some other company.’

  He shook his head, his fingers drumming nervously on the table top. ‘Annie, I couldn’t. It’s not as easy as that. Whoever I go to will ask who I previously worked for. What do I say? That I’d been asked to resign from my own family business? My father would admit to that, if asked.’

  ‘I think your father’s a vindictive man.’

  Immediately she wished the outburst hadn’t been said as Alex’s face changed, growing stubborn. She had blotted her own copybook. He would not now fight for her against his own father, whom she saw he loved, no matter what. It was all at an end.

  ‘Alex,’ she pleaded, pride thrown to the wind. ‘Darling, I love you. I know you love me. There must be something we can do. Please, darling, please say there is. Say you still love me.’ Her voice had risen so that those in the house must hear. She didn’t care.

  He had reached out his hands and was holding hers, his grip fierce. ‘I will have to do as he says. There’s no work here, businesses everywhere are going to the wall and unemployment is rising. I will be going to India. I can’t forsake the family business, Annie.’ For a moment he said no more and she remained silent, enmeshed in the hopelessness of her situation. Then he spoke again.

  ‘But they still can’t stop us getting married.’ ‘What?’ Confusion smothered her senses.

  ‘We could get married secretly.’ His voice had fallen to a whisper that no one in the house could have heard. ‘In a registry office, not even your parents knowing of it. Would you do that?’ When she didn’t answer, unable to for the shock of it all, he went on swiftly. ‘We could do it quickly, go to India together and live there. No one will know for a long while.’

  Now it was her turn to worry, relieved and overjoyed though she was by Alex’s proclamation of love against all odds. ‘I couldn’t deceive Mum and Dad like that.’

  ‘I’m ready to deceive mine – for you.’ She wanted to say, it wasn’t the same, but he was going on. ‘I thought you loved me enough to throw everything overboard. It’s what you were asking me to do.’

  Yes, he was right, but still she hedged. ‘My parents’ view is different to yours. They want to see me married to you. They want to see me happy.’

  ‘But would they be prepared to see you going off to the other side of the world where they’ll not see you for years? What if they insisted you stay here?’ Annie said nothing, and his tone grew confidently coaxing. ‘You can write to them, tell them why you did it. I in turn would write to my parents revealing that we are married, only a little later.’

  She had to say it. ‘Your father could still dismiss you from the family business and we’d have gone through all that for nothing.’

  ‘That’s a risk I’ll be prepared to take. By then I don’t think he will.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What will he gain? We’ll be married. He can hardly undo that, and I don’t think he’d be so stupid as to try. You see, my darling, it’s a threat, to stop me marrying you. He’d never carry it out once we’re married.’

  ‘But he could transfer you to India.’

  Alex chuckled, got up and enfolded her in his arms. ‘And we’d go together, just as we’re planning to do now. You see, we’re going in circles, darling. Are you willing?’

  Yes, she was willing. But she still told her mother on Monday evening, while Dad and Danny were in his cockle shed, the day’s haul being steamed and made ready for Billingsgate market.

  Dad would have gone off the rails had Annie told him direct of her intrigue. Mum could break it to him later, gently, in her usual careful way. There would be argument, but not so stinging as if it came straight out of the blue from Annie’s own mouth.

  All the same, Mum looked as though she had been bitten, her hand flying to her lips, her small rounded face filled wtth fear. ‘Annie, dear. You can’t go off on the other side of the world where we’ll never see you again. You can’t.’

  ‘You would see me, Mum.’ Annie tried to keep the empathetic tears hidden by lowering her face. ‘I shall come home on a visit whenever I can.’

  ‘No you won’t. The tone, so firm, so full of wisdom, made Annie look up. Mum might just as well have said: out of sight, out of mind.

  ‘It won’t be like that, Mum. I’ll make every effort to come home on visits. At least a couple of times a year.’

  ‘And where will the money come from for that?’

  ‘Alex isn’t poor, Mum.’

  ‘Paying for a passage home just to visit people eats into a good deal of money. And it’ll take a good couple of weeks I should think for you to sail home, and the same going back as well as the time visiting us. Do you think your husband will stand for that every six months or so?’

  Annie pushed that argument aside, too painful and too accurate.

  ‘We won’t be away for ever and ever, Mum,’ she changed tack. ‘It’ll only be for a year or two. You’re not losing me for ever.’

  ‘I thought Alex said he was being sent there for an indefinite period.’

  ‘That could be as long or short as it needs to be, Mum.’

  ‘My guess is, when his dad learns what you and him have done, he won’t call him back. Not in a month of Sundays. Do you think, Annie them in their standing’d want their lives turned upside down and be the butt of all their high and mighty friends
with their son introducing a wife what to them looks beneath them? Them sort of people only marry within their own spheres. They need to keep things like this out of the limelight, and somewhere like India or China or some other far-off place is just what the doctor ordered, even though it’ll hurt them just as much as it hurts us, hearing all this. They love their son too.’

  She hadn’t thought of all that. Suddenly the rosy future didn’t seem so rosy. The rest of her life, away from home, never seeing her family again. Quickly, Annie shrugged off the momentary depression. She was prepared to make a life for herself. She loved Alex with all her heart; would follow him wherever he went, to the ends of the earth if need be. Together they would be, must be happy. Stay here just to stay clinging to her family and she’d never see Alex again. That prospect was unbearable. Anyway, despite what Mum said, if it was to be so long away, then she would make efforts to come home at least once a year even if it did take weeks and weeks. Her future lay with Alex, and it was exciting. She felt her heart lighten, the future turning rosy again.

  ‘I know what you’re saying,’ she said. Poor Mum. How she’d miss Annie. And she in turn would miss Mum, dreadfully; Dad and Danny too, but mostly Mum; and Connie and Pam and Josie, the arguments they had, the turmoil of this house, borrowing each other’s things and fighting over them. But the companionship as well, confidences shared, advice offered, comfort in numbers. Away from it all she would only have Alex to comfort and advise her. Would it be the same? But then, Connie was getting married in a few months’ time. She would leave home, set up her own, have her own life. True she would be nearby, in London maybe. But London could be a thousand miles away when she wanted Mum’s advice quickly. So what was the difference? Annie felt cheered. Saw Pam and Josie one day married. And what if she stayed here, too frightened to follow Alex, who would she find to compare to him and would she forever remember the day she got cold feet and backed out? Maybe she would end up settled with some man who would never take Alex’s place, or, because she could find no one to compare, be the last of Mum’s daughters to remain at home, an old maid, destined to look after an elderly couple, be their nurse and when they finally died, be alone? All this thought choked the tears in her breast. She took a deep breath.

  ‘I know where I’m going, Mum. I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘I just hope so,’ her mother said, turning away. Then suddenly she turned back, took Annie and clasped her to her with such strength that Annie felt she was being suffocated, drawn down to her mother’s height by the embrace. ‘I shall miss you, darling.’ The words were muffled by Annie’s shoulder, and by tears. ‘I can’t stop you, love. I wouldn’t. But I’ll miss you so much … I wish you all the happiness in the world, love.’

  As suddenly as she had clasped Annie to her, she let go, giving a little laugh that sounded nearer to weeping. ‘Your Dad’s going to be a sod to handle, when I tell him what’s goin’ on. But we’ll sort him out, you an’ me.’

  Two weeks later they were married, a brief registry office thing with no one in Annie’s family present except for Uncle Bill, Mum’s brother, and Aunt Daphne as witnesses. Annie had begged her family be there but Mum was right as usual.

  ‘I don’t think it’d be proper for us to be there, love. Not because we don’t want to be. I’m goin’ to be really upset not seen’ you married, love, but it’d be underhanded if we was there and not the groom’s people, and them with no idea of what’s goin’ on. I hope you won’t feel too hurt about it, love, but you must see it’s for the best. We don’t want to be seen as accessories to any conspiracy,’ she had added firmly, adopting a little of Alex’s manner of addressing a thing, adding her own simpler version: ‘or anything like that.’

  It was hard not to weep, the wedding she had once dreamed of as far removed from it as any could be, but she had Alex to herself for a week before he left. He’d be going on ahead alone, his parents at London Docks to bid him bon voyage in the belief that he’d be staying in Jalapur eighty miles out of Delhi, working at the agency for his father’s company, dealing and sending back reports until he finally got over this infatuation he’d confessed to. He had told them fiercely that it could be years before he did get over it, scotching any hope his father had of forgiving and recalling him too soon.

  ‘We’ll make a life for ourselves out there,’ he told Annie as they came away from the registry office, man and wife. ‘You’ll be following me on the next passage out. By the time you reach Jalapur I shall have selected a nice residence for us and made all the arrangements about servants.’

  ‘Servants?’

  ‘You didn’t expect to do housework, did you? It would be too hot for a start. No memsahib does housework. That’s for the servants. All you’ll do is go to the club, socialise with the other wives, play cards and croquet and tennis …’

  ‘I don’t know how to play croquet.’

  Instead of exciting her, a small fear had gathered inside her breast all the way to the Strand Hotel in London where they were to stay for a few nights before Alex left for London Docks. She intended to go back home for the two or three days until her own passage was due.

  The full prospect of what lay ahead of her hit her suddenly as they unpacked their clothes in the room he had booked for them both, its splendour paling beside the new thoughts and fears. Who were these wives who played croquet and tennis? What were they like? Would they take to her, accept her? They no doubt spoke beautifully and correctly, these rich wives of colonials whom Alex had casually referred to as the Raj. Would her broad East Essex accent, that lingered no matter how well she’d learned to speak as a high-class hotel receptionist, be detected and sneered at?

  ‘I don’t know how to play croquet, or golf, and I’m no good at tennis.’ Her life hadn’t included such luxuries apart from one game years ago when she had hit the ball clear over the outside net. She had never bothered to play again.

  Alex remained undismayed. ‘You’d pick things up easily enough, my darling. But there are scores of other things for you to do. There’s polo we can watch, and we can go to the races. Swim, play bowls, go motoring or horse riding – I’ll teach you to ride.’ His enthusiasm grew. ‘I’ll teach you to play golf as well, and tennis. We’ll go to dinner parties, and lunch at the European club. Where there are Europeans residing abroad, there’s always a club – a haven for wives with little else to do. You’ll go shopping and play bridge … all right,’ he broke off to laugh. ‘You can’t play bridge, but you’ll learn. We’ll become part of the Raj in no time at all, you’ll see.’

  He was sitting up in bed, the huge canopied bed that dominated this bridal suite. He was in pale green pyjamas, the top half unbuttoned. She stood before him in a pale blue satin nightdress and wrap, part of her small trousseau, having shyly undressed in the huge bathroom, even there too worried by what lay in store for her in India to see its pink tiled opulence.

  ‘But for now …’ he held out his hands to her, inviting her to come to him and she, overcome by a wave of demureness, shed her wrap and, not daring to look at him, slipped in beside him beneath the smooth bed covers. Soon, all fear of the future forgotten as his hands, cool from his bath, moved over her body beneath the satin nightdress, she gave herself up to him with all the delight she had ever dreamed of.

  Chapter Nine

  Pam sat with all the family listening to Mum reading Annie’s first letter. Annie had been gone a few weeks now; her letter arrived yesterday saying how lovely India was. Northern India, its heat cooled by soft breezes from the Himalayas all those hundreds of miles away. India with its sights and its smells, a blend of spicy cooking, dust, exotic scent and cattle dung, she said, not as unpleasant as it sounded; streets crammed with humanity, everyone busy doing something, selling, buying, bartering, mending things, fashioning things – all accompanied by a great deal of noise; buildings of pinkish-brown sandstone; the windows unglazed to let the air blow through; roads brown and dusty, trees to give shade, and the sky deepest blue. Elephants, ca
mels pulling carts, hundreds of people on foot, on bicycles, in two-wheeled tongas and ancient charabancs, never a still or silent moment even at night.

  ‘India lives totally outdoors,’ proclaimed the letter with a note of awe before going on to describe the residence she and Alex had, a spacious yellow and white-painted bungalow surrounded by a white painted wooden veranda, lawns, fruit trees and toddy palms, a pond shaded by a very large peepul tree and an Oriental plane tree, vivid purple bougainvillaea growing over all the boundary walls, flower borders with irises, narcissi and crown imperials. ‘They have a lot of English flowers here,’ she added. ‘I expect they have been brought over by the British. We have a gardener to keep it nice – a mali. See, I’m learning a few words.’ Annie seemed to gush with the pleasure of all this new experience.

  Then after all that, the letter took on an odd and vaguely subdued note: ‘I haven’t made any friends yet. Most people here already have their own groups of friends. It’ll probably take time to get in with them.’

  ‘Sounds a bit cliquish,’ Connie observed.

  ‘Sounds like it ain’t what she was expectin’ it to be,’ their father put in gruffly. ‘Socially, I mean. Scenery sounds all right, but it’s people not scenery what makes up a life.’ He hadn’t got over her leaving despite Peggy’s caution.

  The letter had also said that Alex was away a lot, involved with the agency and travelling between Jalapur and Delhi. It said the servants were helpful, polite, smiled readily, but were so quiet and unobtrusive it was almost as if they weren’t there at all, silently coming and going to her bidding. As yet she wasn’t finding it easy to issue orders to people although whatever she asked was done immediately without question. ‘I’m still not used to having servants. I feel a bit unsure of myself, but terribly pampered.’

  ‘Don’t know about feelin’ pampered,’ Dad said as the letter was at last folded and put reverently back into its envelope. ‘Sounds more like a bit homesick to me. And lonely. What’s he doin’ leaving her alone out there?’