Maddie

by Claire Rayner

  She shook her head. ‘No. It’s partly because she’s changing too. She’s talking a lot, as I said, but most of it’s incomprehensible. I get the feeling sometimes that she goes over and over the same episodes in her life, trying to change the way they happened but not being able to. Oh, I’m explaining this badly. Look, have you ever been a daydreamer? When you were a child?’

  ‘Daydreamer? Probably. Most children are, I imagine.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, not just being inattentive. I mean really daydreaming. I did.’ She stopped. ‘I’m supposed to be talking about Maddie, I know, but this is the only way I can explain. The thing is, I used to choose a subject to think about, a scene I was in, a place, or an event – I had lots of them. Sometimes on a stage, and sometimes being caught in a terrible mystery – all sorts of different ones. I’d sort of see myself in the situation and then let it go – let it happen and watch inside my head. Do you understand?’

  ‘You’re explaining it very well.’ He wasn’t sure what she was trying to get at, but it mattered to her, obviously. So it mattered to him.

  ‘Well, sometimes I liked what happened. I’d watch the story as though it were someone else’s – like a film or a play, and it was marvellous, better than real living. All the best things in my life happened inside my own head. They still do, really.’

  She stopped and stared down into her cup and then, almost with a visible physical effort, dragged herself back to the here and now, lifting her head to look at him.

  ‘But sometimes it used to happen that the story went bad. Ugly and frightening and – and I used to try to drag it round, to change it and make it fun again and to decide for myself how the story I was watching would work out. Sometimes I could. Often I couldn’t, and it would all turn horrible and I’d be helpless and have to watch it all, and see myself going through hell and then I’d be miserable all day. Or I’d sleep badly or I’d get into trouble at school with the Sisters or with Jen at home. Well, the point of all this is that I think that’s what happens to Maddie. She starts to have a vision of her past. Of what happened to her, and how it happened and why. And sometimes she doesn’t like what she sees and tries to change it. But it won’t change. And she has to keep on living it over and over again, the bad parts. And that frightens her. Can you understand?’

  ‘I think I do. You really have developed a strong bond with her, haven’t you?’

  ‘How can I?’ She sounded bitter. ‘How can you have a bond with someone who only ever talks at you and who talks like a torrent about things you can’t entirely understand, and who never explains even when you ask her to, and ignores what you say unless it’s something she wants, like food or a walk or whatever? She responds to me then, well enough. But then she shuts herself up in that cupboard of her own past and talks and talks at me through the door and never hears a word I say. How can I make a bond with that?’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ Her mood was changing. She was becoming irritable again, and a dullness seemed to spread over her, the way it spreads over landscapes when clouds move over the sun. ‘What does it matter what I want, anyway? It’s what she wants that’s important, isn’t it? And you want to find out about her so that you can work out how to dispose of her.’

  ‘It’s more than that with me,’ he said mildly. ‘It started that way, I agree, but now I’m eaten with curiosity about Maddie. I want to know in the worst way what it is that made her become an elective mute for so many years, and why she’s now talking. I think it’s because of you – you say it’s just that the time has come. Well, why did it come? And where do we go from here? That’s the important question.’

  August October 1950

  ‘Why do you want to go? That’s the question. Just to come and tell me you feel like it – that’s no reason. It costs money, you know, gallivanting. And what for? Anyway, I need you here. You’ve got a job now, you know. Part of the family business, you are. You wouldn’t want to go off and leave me in the lurch, now would you? Forget it, sweetheart, forget it. I ain’t being touched for no transatlantic ship tickets.’

  And that was that. When Alfred was adamant that he wasn’t going to spend money on something, then he never would. He was unmovable. If there was one thing Maddie had learned in the years of being the most important woman in his life, it was that. Before her mother had been killed in the air raids of 1940 he had been an easier man, as she remembered him. Whatever she asked for she got. But that had changed after Mummy had gone. He had indulged her, of course he had; but there were times when he dug in his heels and wouldn’t be budged. And this, Maddie knew, was one of them.

  So she would have to do it alone. It wouldn’t be easy, but that made no difference. It still had to be done, and done quickly. Jay had told her that he was going in six weeks – he had to organise one or two things of his own, he had said importantly and refused to tell her what they were, and why was she rushing him, anyway?

  ‘Are you trying to get rid of me sooner?’ he had said, making a face at her that she found quite adorable. ‘I thought you were going to miss me.’

  ‘I shan’t miss you in the slightest,’ she had said airily, putting on a great show of bravado that wasn’t meant to convince him and which didn’t, while gleefully hugging to herself the knowledge that she wouldn’t need to, and he had laughed and kissed her cheek and told her she was a crazy kid but cute with it and he was going to miss her, anyway. And she had thought, six weeks – I’ve got to move fast, and kissed him back and told him that of course she was going to miss him dreadfully, and he was a hateful beast not to take her with him.

  Six weeks. First the passport problem. She’d been on her father’s hitherto, but now she had to have her own, and it was the fact that she wanted new clothes that made that possible.

  ‘But, Daddy,’ she argued when he told her she could do her shopping in London perfectly well. ‘You know it’s impossible! Ever since clothes came off coupons you haven’t been able to get a single interesting thing! All the shops have got are millions of dreary things for dreary people. I want the sort you used to have to buy black market – and the only place I can get them is Paris. You know it’s true!’

  ‘Oh, dammit, why can’t you be like other girls and settle for what you can get? All right, all right, leave me alone already. You want Paris, you’d better have Paris.’

  It had worked like a dream, reminding him how important it was that Alfred Braham’s daughter should look exciting and different and not the same as everyone else’s daughter, and she held out her hand gleefully as he put a cheque for a hundred pounds into it.

  ‘But I can’t take you till the end of October, so you’ll just have to be patient – no nagging,’ he went on and at once she pouted and threw her arms round him and began the coaxing she knew he liked so much.

  ‘But Daddy, that’s ages away! You can’t make me wait so long! If you can’t go, let me go on my own, hmm? I’ll ask Ruth to come with me – she’s so dull she’ll make sure I stay dull too. I’ll be perfectly safe. Let me go, Daddy, or I’ll sulk all over the office and put everything in wrong files and then where will you be?’

  And Alfred, who was feeling a good deal more genial these days since fewer of his special deals seemed to be melting away under his fingers and business looked like picking up, laughed and slapped her behind and agreed. She had known that would happen, known he wouldn’t be able to take her, and now she said offhandedly, ‘Well, then, I suppose I’d better fix up a passport for myself then.’

  ‘What? Yeah – suppose you had. Never thought of that. It’d be easier to wait till October –’

  ‘Not a bit of it!’ she said and hugged him once more. ‘I’ll get the forms and everything and you can sign ‘em. So that’ll be that –’ and of course it was.

  Getting a berth was a lot harder. Ships making the transatlantic crossing in the summer and autumn months were always more heavily booked than the rougher winter ones, when seasickn
ess dogged the Atlantic and spoiled trade, and to get on to the same ship as Jay was essential. She had first to find out which ship that was and then get on it herself and in a different part of it, too. All of which was likely to prove difficult indeed.

  It took her a terrifying ten days to get the information she needed out of Jay. He was being very secretive, she felt, and that drove her nearly demented with anxiety, but she didn’t dare to let him know that. It might make him withdraw even more and that was not to be allowed. She had heard whispers among some of the people she met at parties that he wasn’t above kicking up his heels with some of the better known easy girls, but that didn’t worry her. A man spending time with tarts was to be expected. As long as he didn’t love any of them, there would be no problems. And if she nagged him about tarts, then he might find her the harder to love. It wasn’t easy, Maddie told herself, to be as wise and clever a woman as women were supposed to be. None of her magazines had ever told her how to handle a situation like this one. But she felt instinctively she was doing it right, and battled on.

  And it paid off. On a Saturday night when they had gone dancing at the Caprice and had laughed a great deal and he had seemed to her to be closer than ever to her in mood, and had admired the pretty clothes she had brought back from her three days in Paris the week before (for having fussed so to Alfred about the need to go, she had of course been forced to make the trip even though she wasn’t nearly as keen to go as she might have been) he told her casually that he was sailing on the eighth to New York, on the Mauretania, and she wasn’t to fuss about it.

  ‘Who’s fussing?’ she said lightly and smiled at him. But she made sure it was a tremulous smile that seemed to hide the threat of tears. Oh, but she was being clever and sensible; oh, but she could teach other women a thing or two. ‘I know it can’t be helped. As long as you keep our promise and send for me to marry me as soon as you can –’

  ‘You know something, Maddie?’ He came closer and held her so that his lips were very close to her ear as they moved through the slow foxtrot that they were dancing to, ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, ‘I do want to marry you. I used to think it was a crazy idea, and I won’t pretend I didn’t. But you’ve got a way of growing on a man, and I’m going to miss you like the devil. I wish I could have taken you with me, believe me. But I’ll have to sort things out with my Pa, and having you along’d make it tough. But let me sweeten him and then you’ll be on the next ship over. It’s a promise.’

  And she had closed her eyes ecstatically and inclined her head a little more towards him so that he could nibble her earlobe and knew she would get what she wanted, all that she wanted. The secret of life, she whispered inside her head, is to want things and to imagine the things you want happening to you, and then to go out and make them happen. That’s the secret and it’s my secret and I am happy, happy, happy. Or I soon will be, when I make it all happen the way it’s supposed to –

  ‘Let me come and see you off at – where will you be sailing from? Liverpool? Southampton?’

  ‘Southampton,’ he said and looked down on her fondly. ‘All right, come and see me off. If you feel you must.’

  ‘Of course I must. I want to spend as much time as I can with you –’ she murmured and looked tremulous again. It really was absurd; he was getting as easy to handle as her father was.

  It took a good deal more than tremulous smiles, however, to get herself a berth and there were times when she almost despaired, as she travelled from shipping agent to shipping agent, trying to find one who had some extra leverage with Cunard. It began to look ominously true that there were no berths available at all. Until just five days before the ship was due to sail she found a man in a tatty office in Holborn who listened to her heartrending tale of a lover who had gone back to America after the war and was now waiting for her in New York, and had sent her the money for her ticket and was insisting she sail on this ship.

  ‘He’s from Nevada,’ she improvised, wide-eyed and anxious as she gazed at the grubby little man who lounged behind the scarred wooden counter of the small shop. ‘And he’s going to be in New York to meet me that day, the fourteenth. What can I do? I can’t travel from New York on my own. I’d be too scared. Please, Mister, get me on that ship. My sweetheart sent me enough money to buy a good ticket, an expensive one. Can you help?’

  For an extra twenty-five pounds he managed somehow to bend all the rules and take risks to get her a berth which was as much as his job was worth, as he told her over and over again, and she accepted what he had, no longer concerned to know where in the ship it might be. If she had to share with seven seasick mothers and babies in a cabin set right over the screw, she’d do it. It was only for a few short days, anyway. Just five days out of Le Havre and then they’d be in America and she would at last be Mrs Jay Kincaid and the real living could begin. And she curled up with delight as she thought of it and began slowly and with great care to smuggle her clothes out of the Regent’s Park flat and into a cheap hotel room she had found, ready to be on her way.

  She told her father casually that she was going to Southampton to see off a friend who was going to New York.

  ‘Mary Saltash, you remember? Her dad’s in the diplomatic or something. So I won’t be at the office that afternoon. Can you manage without me?’

  ‘I suppose I’ll bloody have to,’ he said. ‘Are you giving me any choices?’

  ‘Not really!’ she said sunnily and suddenly jumped up from the table where they were sitting eating breakfast and threw her arms round him. ‘I do love you, Daddy, you know. You’re so good to me.’

  He swivelled his eyes and glared at her. ‘Hey, hey, what is all this? What are you after? You don’t come the angel of the hearth like this unless you’re up to something.’

  Alarmed at the risk she had taken she hugged him closer and murmured into his cigar-scented hair, ‘How well you know me! I spent too much money in Paris, Daddy. Ever so much too much. I need a lot more. How about three hundred pounds?’

  ‘Three hundred – are you potty?’ He pushed her arms away and turned and glared at her. ‘Three hundred pounds is real money, you know! It doesn’t grow on bushes with tomatoes. You must be out of your mind to get into debt like that. As bad as your brother.’

  ‘You know that’s not fair.’ She was in such a delight that she had salvaged the situation so well it was all she could do to keep her face properly controlled and to look suitably repentant. ‘Honestly, Daddy, when did I last ask you for so much? Hmm? I mean, for a debt? Not once to every five times Ambrose does –’

  He grumbled for a long time, but of course he gave it to her in the form of a handful of crisp white fivers, since he’d earned some useful extra side money this week anyway, and she rewarded him with kisses and flattering attention and extra effort at the office, leaving everything in the best order she could manage. It wasn’t going to be easy for him once she’d gone. She knew that. He’d be confused and angry and fit to be tied, so the least she could do was to make the parting as painless as possible. And that meant a perfectly clean and orderly flat – and she harried Mrs Nemethy, their daily help, mercilessly to achieve that – and an office as thoroughly organised as an army barracks.

  On the evening of the seventh of October she told her father she was going to the theatre with her friend Elizabeth and then in the morning to Southampton to see her friend Mary off on her travels, reminding him he’d said she could, and kissed him goodnight for the last time. It was going to be strange not seeing Daddy again for a long time, but it couldn’t be helped. That was the price that had to be paid, if she was to be Mrs Jay Kincaid. He’d understand, eventually, she told herself, as she packed that night in the hotel room to which most of her belongings had now been shifted. He’d have to.

  Because for herself, it was all settled. Tomorrow she was to leave her home to go to a new country to be married to the only man in the world who mattered.

  11

  October 1950

  Three t
imes she had been round the Mauretania‘s deck, looking for him. Three times along the level by the sundeck, past the row of lifeboats, round the shuffleboard deck, returning along the second boat deck and then back to the bow and the rows of bleak and mostly empty deckchairs. There were a couple of people sitting out bravely, wrapped in blankets and with blue noses and miserable eyes peering out at the grey skies and pitching seas that were much the same steely colour, waiting for the moment they could go scuttling below to tell their newfound friends that it was really lovely up on deck, bracing, you know, so healthy and delightful. But they were the only ones. Once the ship had eased her way out of Southampton Water and left Ryde and Ventnor and the last traces of the Isle of Wight vanishing behind her they would go below to the grateful warmth of the saloons and the luscious offerings of the cocktail bars and she would have the twilit deck to herself. Without any sign of Jay.

  Shivering a little she leaned against the rail, staring down at the water far below as it peeled lazily away from the sides of the great liner and tried to catch her breath which had for some time now been sticking in her throat, so that she found herself breathing fast and anxiously even when she wasn’t moving about. She felt a little queasy, too, her throat tightening against the bile in her gullet as the ship shuddered against the swell of the water, and rolled a little more heavily. But she wasn’t seasick; she was never seasick. She had crossed the Channel on those awful bucketing little ferries quite unscathed often enough to know that. The way she felt now was nothing to do with the sea. It was fear, simple cold fear. She had never felt so alone, so vulnerable or so unsure of herself as she did at this moment, and it was the nastiest feeling she had ever had.

  And it wasn’t to be given in to. She lifted her chin as resolutely as she could but that dislodged the thick woollen cap she had pulled down over her ears against the cold, and she had to pull it on again, and that meant letting go of the rail just at the wrong moment, for the ship lurched and she went skittering along the deck and ran painfully into a stanchion that was sticking out from one of the rails. She felt the bruise begin to appear in her thigh and she rubbed it furiously, staring out over the rail at the vanishing shoreline at the same time, willing herself to keep her head, not to panic, above all not to weep. She had a deep certainty that if she once gave in to this mood of fear and loneliness she would be overwhelmed by it. Control was what she needed –