Survivor

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘And why shouldn’t she be?’ he asked. ‘She’s about to embark on an adventure. We have to trust her now to look after herself.’

  ‘I just wish I was certain she will come back to us,’ Belle whispered. ‘Look at all the people we know here whose sons and daughters have gone off to Australia, America or Europe and never come back?’

  ‘If she finds happiness in England and wants to stay there, then so be it,’ he said. ‘I’d sooner she was away from us and happy than with us and unhappy. I’m sure you feel the same?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she sighed. ‘But I’m not going to think about that, it makes me feel too sad.’

  6

  Mariette was glad when an announcement was made asking all visitors not sailing on the SS Rimutaka to leave the ship immediately. It hurt to see Mog and her papa so sad and emotional at her leaving. She felt like breaking down and sobbing herself, but she knew that would just make them feel even worse.

  This morning at the guest house, when she’d dressed in the yellow dress and its matching bolero jacket that Mog had made for her, and secured the cheeky little yellow and white striped sateen and tulle hat at a rakish angle on the side of her head, she’d felt like a Hollywood film star. She even had new shoes with the latest Louis heel, and a trunk full of new, exciting clothes. But a new wardrobe didn’t make up for leaving her family; it would never give her the comfort and security her loved ones did.

  ‘You mind you behave yourself,’ Mog said warningly, for about the twentieth time that day, as she dabbed her eyes with a lace-trimmed hanky that was already sodden. ‘Or I’ll come on over and give you what for.’

  Mog enveloped her in a tight hug. As always, she smelled of her lavender cologne – a smell Mariette would always associate with home. Today had been the first time she had become aware that Mog was getting old; it was a hot day, and she’d been breathless and hesitant in her walking. As Mariette hugged her back, she thought how terrible it would be if Mog died before she came home, and her eyes filled up with tears.

  ‘Don’t work so hard, Moggy,’ she managed to say. ‘It’s time you sat back and had a rest.’

  Mog held Mariette by the shoulders, tears running down her cheeks as she looked at her. ‘Let me get one last good look at you, my precious one,’ she said, her voice faltering with emotion. ‘You’ll be in my heart and in my prayers. Write to us all the time, promise me?’

  Mariette could only nod and turn to her papa. To her shock, she saw that he too had tears in his eyes. He was so much taller than her that she buried her face in his chest, and his hug almost crushed her.

  ‘I can’t find the right words to tell you what you mean to me, Mari,’ he whispered. ‘All I can say is it’s like the wind out on the bay when we race the dinghy, or landing a huge marlin, or the first strawberries of the year. Now you must take full advantage of this trip to England, and enjoy it. But think before you act, and listen to your conscience. And come home safe to us, when you are ready.’

  She felt rather than saw his kisses on her cheeks, and the final squeeze of her hands, because her eyes were blinded with tears.

  Mog looked so small and vulnerable supported by Papa as they went down the gangway to the wharf. Even Papa, whom she had thought indestructible, seemed less sprightly and strong. Her whole being wanted to run after them and say she couldn’t leave them, because she loved them too much, but it was too late. The ship’s engine had started, the sailors were removing the gangway, and they were about to cast off.

  So she clung tightly to the rail and waved, just one of 600 other passengers on a ship that was only three-quarters full. Many of them were crying at leaving loved ones, others were very excited because they were relishing a trip to England, and there were a few families who looked both poor and glum with no one to wave to. She guessed these were people who had failed in New Zealand and decided to cut their losses and go home. Strangely, it was these families she identified with most; she guessed that, even now, in Russell there were those who would be gossiping about her and reminding each other that her father had lost money on his vineyard enterprise and his wife had been pregnant on their wedding day.

  Saying goodbye to her mother and the boys had been awful. Only Peggy and Don from the bakery came to see her off at the jetty in Russell. Usually the whole town turned out for such occasions, and their absence brought it home to her just how much she had disgraced herself and her family. She could see her mother’s anxiety and sorrow etched into her face, and although she tried very hard to appear jolly and happy for her daughter, Mariette knew she would go home and cry. She wouldn’t even have her husband and Mog there with her to comfort her. Even the boys looked sad, hugging and kissing her without any prompting, and reminding her she was to send them postcards of every place she went to.

  Until now, as the ship moved slowly away from the wharf, she hadn’t had the sense that she was really leaving New Zealand – she’d half expected something would happen to prevent it – but this was it now, the gap between her and land widening with every second. She waved even more fiercely, even though she could no longer make out Mog or her father’s features. All she could really see were their hats; Mog’s was navy blue, trimmed with white ribbon, and her father was waving his panama with one hand and a handkerchief with the other. In a few days it would be Christmas, and new tears spilled over at the thought of her brothers opening their stockings without her being there to share their excitement.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ she vowed to herself. ‘Not with my tail between my legs but successful and triumphant. You’ll see.’

  The ship was picking up speed now and the people on the wharf were barely visible. It was time to go and stow her things away in the cabin she would be sharing with another single girl.

  As she walked to the companionway that led down to the cabin, Mariette struggled to compose herself. She was not going to be a baby and cry, because the daydream she’d had for years of seeing the world was a reality now. She was going to cross the equator, go from one hemisphere to another, to the place her parents and Mog had talked about so often.

  Of course, in her daydreams about such an adventure, she’d always imagined having someone with her, not doing it alone. She might have new clothes to wear, money to spend and people meeting her at Southampton, but it was so very scary.

  She managed to find her cabin easily as her father had brought her down here when they first arrived at the ship. When she saw how tiny it was – two bunks with just a couple of feet of space next to them – she’d understood why she needed to pack clothes for the voyage in a small suitcase and let her trunk go in the hold.

  But, as she opened the cabin door, she saw her cabin mate didn’t appear to know this, because the entire floor space was strewn with clothes. Picking her way gingerly through the clothing, she saw a dark-haired girl lying on the bottom bunk with her face buried in the pillow, and crying.

  ‘Hello,’ she ventured. ‘I’m sharing with you.’

  ‘There isn’t room in here to share, it’s no bigger than a coffin,’ the girl said, her face still buried in the pillow and her voice muffled. ‘And I wish I was dead.’

  Seeing another girl prostrate with grief had a galvanizing effect on Mariette. As much as she could easily have taken to her own bunk to cry at leaving home and family behind, she thought the girl looked and sounded drippy, and she wasn’t going to copy her.

  ‘That’s a daft thing to say when we are less than a mile from land,’ Mariette said. ‘I’m sad at leaving my family too, but there’s no point in wallowing.’

  With that, the girl turned her head and stared at Mariette with eyes that were red and swollen. She looked as if she was in her mid twenties.

  ‘Who the hell are you to say I’m wallowing?’ she asked aggressively.

  ‘Because your stuff is all over the cabin, and it seems to me more sensible to put it away before you lie down and feel sorry for yourself. I’ve got to share this cabin too.’

  ‘There
isn’t enough room in here for one person, let alone two. It’s not what I’m used to at all.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be – not unless you’d spent your whole life on a ship.’ Mariette was beginning to be irritated. ‘You’ll have to pack some of this stuff away and let the steward put it in the hold, like I did.’

  ‘I need everything,’ the girl said in alarm. ‘I’m not taking it anywhere.’

  Mariette paused for a second. She didn’t like the girl’s superior tone or even how she looked. She was big, and her face was as mottled as corned beef. But she didn’t want to start the voyage with a row.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Stella Murgatroyd,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I’m Mariette Carrera, usually known as Mari. So, Stella, we’re in this cabin together for several weeks. And, as you point out, there isn’t much room. That means we have to be tidy. There’s a drawer under each bunk, a very narrow cupboard to hang stuff in and two shelves. So you’d better start stowing your stuff away, because otherwise I’ll be trampling on it all as I unpack.’

  ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Stella got up from the bunk and stood several inches taller than Mariette, so close to her that her big breasts were almost touching her. ‘I don’t expect a child to tell me what to do.’

  ‘Excuse me, you are the one that’s behaving like a child,’ Mariette said with indignation. ‘And a very rude one at that. Put your case on your bunk, fold some of this stuff up and put it back in.’ She bent down, picked up an armful of clothes and dumped them on the bunk. ‘We’re getting off on the wrong foot here. Just sort it all out, then perhaps we can go and get a cup of tea and make friends.’

  With that, the girl’s face crumpled and she began to cry again. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said through her tears. ‘I don’t want to go to England. But they made me.’

  Mariette was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the small space; it was tempting to run out of the cabin and leave this great blubbering lump to sort herself out. But her mother had always impressed on her that she should help those smaller and less able than herself. The girl certainly wasn’t smaller, but she looked incapable of doing anything for herself.

  ‘Right, we’ll leave it all for now,’ she said. ‘Wash your face and we’ll go and get some tea, and you can tell me all about it. How’s that?’

  Stella didn’t even know how to pull down the folding washbasin; she just stared blankly until Mariette showed her how it worked. She showed no signs of being able to find a face flannel, so Mariette dampened the corner of a towel and wiped the girl’s face as she would have done to her brothers.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘There might be some handsome sailors around. You wouldn’t want them to see you with a blotchy face, would you?’

  In the saloon, an hour and two cups of tea later, Mari had discovered the reason for Stella’s distress. She was twenty-four, both her parents had died of Spanish flu in 1919, when she was five, and she and her elder brother and sister had gone to live with their grandparents in Wellington. When her grandfather died, he had left all three children some money. Her brother and sister had gone off to England, leaving fifteen-year-old Stella with her grandmother.

  ‘I was intending to go to England and join them when I was twenty-one and got my money,’ Stella said. ‘But Grandma got sick just before that, and I couldn’t very well leave her. I’ve had nearly three years of doing everything for her, and it’s been awful, I can’t even talk about how bad it was. But then she died a few months ago, and instead of me being able to carry on living in her house and having a nice life again, I found out she’d left the house and her money to my uncle, and he wanted me out. He never did a thing for Grandma, hardly ever visited her, and he didn’t give a damn about what would happen to me.’

  Mariette viewed this story with a dose of scepticism. From what Stella had said, her grandmother’s house was large, with several servants, and so it was very unlikely she’d had sole care of her sick grandmother. In the short while she’d known Stella she’d learned enough to guess that the girl had led quite a privileged life. Perhaps her grandmother felt that as Stella had already been left money by her grandfather, she should build her own life, just as the other two siblings had done.

  ‘So you are going to join your brother and sister in England then?’ she asked.

  ‘That was my plan,’ Stella said. ‘But my brother wrote just a few days ago and said that, although I can stay with him for a couple of weeks, I’ll have to find a job and accommodation of my own. I don’t know how I’m going to do that, I’ve never worked.’

  Mariette tried hard not to smirk. ‘You could get a job as a housekeeper as you’ve experience of looking after your grandma,’ she suggested.

  ‘Oh no, I couldn’t be anyone’s servant,’ Stella said in horror. ‘I wasn’t brought up for that.’

  As Mariette made some small talk about the ship and some of the other passengers she’d seen, she studied Stella. She was no beauty, she had all the grace of a carthorse, and her duck-egg-blue dress, though clearly good quality, was dowdy – more suited to someone of Mog’s age than a girl of twenty-four. Her dark hair was fixed up in an untidy bun, but it was very shiny, and she had pretty hazel eyes. Now that the red blotches on her face were fading, Mariette could see she had a good, clear complexion too.

  There was a brooch on Stella’s dress that looked to Mariette like real sapphires and diamonds, not paste, and the opal and diamond ring on her finger looked as if it had been passed down from her grandmother. So her other clothes might be far nicer.

  Mog had often said how much she liked bringing out women’s real potential when she made clothes for them, and it occurred to Mariette that on this long voyage she could do worse than pass the time by turning this ugly duckling into, if not a swan, at least a more attractive woman.

  ‘Well, Stella,’ she said, ‘we’re stuck with one another for six weeks. I think we should spend the time improving ourselves, maybe learning new things or getting to know people who are very different from us, but first we have to sort out the cabin and your clothes. And as I’m good at clothes, let me decide for you what needs to be packed away.’

  If Mariette had hoped to share a cabin with a like-minded, fun-loving girl, she would have been disappointed in Stella. Fortunately, she’d expected to be sharing it with a grumpy, elderly spinster who moaned about everything, so Stella didn’t seem that bad.

  She was lazy, slow and very unworldly, but Mariette soon found she was the easiest person in the world to lead by the nose.

  It began with her clothes. Mariette went through them, dug out the ones suitable for hot weather and packed the rest away. Within two days, she’d persuaded Stella her hair was more attractive worn loose, and, having discovered there was a hairdresser amongst the passengers, she persuaded her to have it cut to shoulder length. It was a triumph: all at once she looked her real age, not as if she was fast approaching middle-age.

  ‘Grandma said the only time a woman could wear her hair loose was in the bedroom with her husband,’ Stella said, looking at herself in the mirror doubtfully.

  ‘That went out with the sinking of the Titanic,’ Mariette informed her. ‘And all your dresses are far too long, they should be no longer than mid-calf, so we’re going to shorten them.’

  While it was quite satisfying sorting out Stella, it didn’t actually prevent Mariette from getting homesick. It came over her in waves when she saw another passenger hugging her child, or when they had a meal which reminded her of home. There was an officer who looked just like her papa from the back; each time she saw him walking along the deck, it gave her a jolt. And at night-time, in her bunk, she missed her mother or Mog coming to tuck her in.

  As they went into dinner on Christmas Day, Mariette felt quite smug at seeing one of the waiters smile flirtatiously at Stella and linger a little longer than necessary as he served her dinner. He wasn’t much to look at, in his mid thirties with thinn
ing hair, but it was evidence that the shortened skirt of Stella’s red velvet dress and her new hairstyle were working.

  When she’d woken that morning, Mariette had felt really sad imagining Alexis and Noel’s excitement as they looked in their stockings – so much so, she cried for a little while. But although Stella was a poor substitute for her family, to see her new friend smiling and her eyes sparkling because she’d finally got some male attention did make Mariette feel a little less cast off and alone.

  The first ten days of the voyage were pleasant and leisurely. She liked that there was no one giving her chores to do, or telling her off because she didn’t help around the house enough. She had Stella for company, and although the girl was nervy and snobbish and they had little in common, Mariette could persuade her to do whatever she wanted. They lazed around in the sun, played quoits on deck, or card games in the saloon, talked to other passengers. And when Mariette tired of people, she spent her time either reading or gazing out at the vastness of the ocean.

  But even for someone who liked the sea as much as she did, it soon wore thin when day after day she was looking at the same blue vista of sea and sky. There was the occasional school of porpoises or dolphins to excite her, and now and then another ship in the distance, but with each day these sightings grew less remarkable. She was bored, time passed so slowly, and she wanted some exercise – swimming, sailing or just walking. She could, of course, walk round and round the deck, but she thought that would drive her mad.

  She also found herself becoming irritated by many of the passengers because all they could do was gripe about New Zealand. Only a few of the English people aboard were going back to visit relatives; in the main, they were returning because they hadn’t been happy in New Zealand. Some had lost their jobs and their money during the Depression, others found farming too hard a life, and there were those who had emigrated thinking they’d love the wide open spaces, only to discover they missed the crowds in English cities. It was disappointing for Mariette to find out that so many of the passengers were dull and timid, whereas she had fully expected them all to be bold and adventurous.