Maddie

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Listen, I promised you I wouldn’t get pregnant, and I won’t. I’ve been ready for us any time this past three months. I’ve got some special things, you see – I didn’t the first time – I didn’t expect – well, it was all a bit sudden, wasn’t it? But I’ve used them since and I reckon I’m all right. We’ll find out in a month or two, if not. Right now, it’s not that I’m worried about. Listen Jay, I’d better explain –’

  It wasn’t easy, walking the narrow line between getting him to understand how important it was to do things her way and not alarming him so much that he would turn and run. That he wanted her and needed her she had no doubt now; even in just a lifeboat she had found ways to make him almost burst with excitement, and knew already how to coax him and tease him and either hold him back or push him over the edge into explosive climax when she wanted to – and as often, too. She had a control over him that was not only exciting in its own right; it added to her own sexual hunger and responsiveness. Together they had rolled and struggled and tumbled into a shared need and a shared excitement that tied them together as tightly as the boat itself was fastened to the ship. But for all that she knew his frailties better than he realised she did. Not a man to turn and fight problems, her Jay, she had told herself in the long nights when she had lain in her crowded cabin listening to other women snoring and trying to work out what to do. He needed protection and support and she had to provide it if she was to get what she wanted from life with him.

  So now she told him just enough to make him understand. Her father, she said, had found out that she had gone, and had cabled the ship.

  ‘I can get off, I think, without being caught, if you’ll help. And I mustn’t be stopped, any more than you must, because I don’t trust Daddy. He’s going to start checking the books and finding out how – what I’ve been doing for you. He’ll know where your money came from – and he’ll make trouble, given half the chance. We mustn’t let him.’

  ‘You can’t stop him,’ Jay said and held her close as the wind howled viciously through the ropes and davits that held the boat. ‘Not from three thousand miles away, for God’s sake. Hell, this is a shit of a mess –’

  ‘I know. So we have to keep out of his way. I’ve done what I can to stop him following us. Look, do as I say – and as soon as we’re ashore we’ll get married. Once you’re his son-in-law, there’ll be no more problems.’

  ‘How can you know that? If he’s really angry enough –’

  She shook her head vigorously in the darkness. ‘I’m sure I’m right. Yes, I know I made a mistake over him finding out about me going. But that was my fault, I wasn’t thorough enough. But I’m not wrong about how he’ll be if we get married. Believe me, Jay. Do as I say, and we’ll sort it all out. Once he knows I’m your wife he’ll stop being so angry about his money. He’ll see it as going to me and that’ll make it okay. He’s never been mean with me – not with money.’

  She stood there holding him and holding her breath too. Would he believe her? He had to; because although it was true up to a point that she believed Alfred would stop hunting her once they were married, she couldn’t be sure, any more than she could be sure that once they reached Boston Jay wouldn’t give in to his parents’ view of how he should live his life. He’d talked a good deal about his home and his parents during their times together on this voyage, when he wasn’t making love to her, or playing poker, which he did a great deal. And she was getting a hazy but worrying picture of people as dominating and as difficult as Alfred himself was. It wasn’t going to be easy to win them round, she had begun to think, not easy at all.

  But now, telling Jay of her own troubles with Alfred, it all began to fall into place as elegantly and satisfyingly as a well-constructed jigsaw puzzle. Use the problems to her own advantage, that was the thing. Push him into marrying before they got to Boston and had to face the Kincaids en masse. One Kincaid, her Jay, was easy to handle. But a houseful? She was beginning to doubt her ability there.

  ‘So, will you do as I say, Jay? Listen, I’ve worked it all out.’

  ‘I’ll bet you have. You really are one crazy kid, Maddie –’ And he kissed her violently and she held on to him tightly. He had drunk rather a lot at dinner, and adding all that to the hour they had spent in the boat before changing, she hadn’t expected he’d be at all amorous tonight. But the cold air was blowing the alcohol out of him and the closeness of them was bringing her back into his blood, and she felt him harden against her belly as he pushed his pelvis against her.

  ‘In a minute, darling – very soon – listen –’

  And she told him all he had to do, and then they climbed into their boat and again set it rocking, not emerging until almost midnight, while Allan Foss lugubriously patrolled cocktail bars and dance bands, cardrooms and lounges, looking for her. It was their last night at sea and he’d had such high hopes …

  The stewardess had lost all her doubts, and was actually beginning to enjoy it all. She listened enthralled to Maddie’s tale of their elopement, of the way her father (‘he’s a baronet – frightful snob, you know, Master of Hounds and all that, and just can’t understand what it is to be young and in love. Everyone who knows him says Sir Jeffrey never loved anyone but horses’) had beaten her when he discovered she was in love with her handsome American who was, of course, a war hero, and how the only way she could ever achieve happiness was to run away. And now she’d discovered that he had notified the police in America of her flight and had arranged for them to stop her at the pier and drag her from her beloved’s arms.

  ‘And oh, please, dear Enid,’ Maddie said with tears in her eyes, clutching the girl’s hand and staring up piteously into her rather vapid face, ‘please, you can’t let that happen to me! All I need is your uniform – I’ll buy it from you, your spare one. You’ve got a spare one, haven’t you? I’ll give you a hundred pounds for it – that’s an awful lot of money.’

  It was the money more than the romantic treacle of her tale which swayed it, Maddie rather thought, and that was a comfort. Not only was it much more reliable as both bait and goad; it was easier to deal with. It was quite fun to use the language of the magazines she had once read so avidly to get what she wanted from this rather silly girl, but there was too much of a real problem to waste time on that; so dealing with a simple cash transaction made much more sense to her.

  And to Enid, who duly took her to her cubbyhole full of dusters and sick bowls and gave her the uniform. It needed a little fixing to fit her because Maddie was rather bigger busted than Enid – a fact which made the girl almost back out of the whole arrangement in a sudden fit of pique – but she was soothed at the sight of the ten white five pound notes that Maddie gave her on account and agreed to go on with the arrangement.

  It involved nothing very difficult after all. Maddie packed her cases early in the morning, making a small parcel out of one change of clothes, and moved them out of the way of the other frantic packers in her cabin, her passport well hidden inside one of them, as early as she could. Enid then took them to the midsection of the ship where luggage to be portered ashore was being collected amid a great hubbub, to find Jay waiting to change the labels, erasing Maddie’s name and putting on his own. She had only two cases for she had brought just some of her better and more recent Paris clothes, determined to buy masses of exciting new things in America, and she was deeply glad of that decision now. Jay himself had six bags and would have fussed considerably, she suspected, if he had been saddled with an equivalent number of hers.

  The next stage was for Enid to collect her shore pass from the bo’sun, using her own passport, and then to bring it to Maddie, who was waiting for her, already changed into the spare uniform, in the stewardess’s cubbyhole.

  ‘All you have to do is show that and walk off. There’ll be no problems – not till tonight when they count up and discover I’ve not come back on board. Then they’re likely to try to fuss, ‘cos we’re not supposed to stay ashore overnight without special p
ermission. She’s a bit fussy, the chief stewardess on this ship.’

  ‘But you’ll be all right?’ Maddie was alarmed. The last thing she wanted was Enid suddenly taking fright.

  ‘Yeah – it’ll be a real treat to put one over on that old cow. I’ll just go along at eleven o’clock and tell her I want some aspirin for my period or something. Then she’ll say where’ve you been and I’ll say I went ashore but that I didn’t feel well so I come back again and can I have that aspirin and the morning off tomorrow and she’ll moan at me and then when the bo’sun tells her one of her girls is adrift she’ll give him hell for being so inefficient and losing my pass, on account of I’m back on the ship, so I must have handed it in. And then tomorrow, or the next day, when I feel better an’ I want to go ashore again, they’ll have to make me a new pass, won’t they?’

  ‘You’re a clever girl, Enid,’ Maddie said admiringly. ‘And so kind and nice to me. I do appreciate it, really I do.’

  ‘Well, it’s a pleasure, dearie. I mean, you having so cruel a father an’ all. I always knew they was like that, those sort of people. You ought to have a mum and dad like mine, really nice ordinary people what cares for you. None of these snobs knows anything about love, do they? Not like Mum and Dad. They had ever such a romantic time they did –’

  And Maddie, knowing when the time had come to pay her debts, sat and listened to Enid’s interminable tale of her parents’ courtship when her Dad had been a merchant seaman and her mother a housemaid in a house that was, Enid said, ‘Just like your Dad’s, miss – not interested in nothing but ‘orses and dogs, and not people at all. I tell you, my Mum told me about them people and she’d be real glad I’m helping you. So good luck to you, miss – and God bless you –’

  And her benison worked, for two hours after the Mauretania docked at seventeen hundred hours on Friday 14th October 1950, Madeleine Braham gave the other ten five pound notes to Enid and walked ashore past the jabbering crush of meeters and porters and customs men and taxi drivers and all the rest of the people who had business at Pier Ninety-Two, with a nod from the bo’sun who checked her shore-leave pass with a grunt and never an upward look at her, and melted into the melee of members of the ship’s crew bent on a wild night on the town, and passengers who bade each other noisy farewells and haggled with porters over tips and shouted furiously about lost luggage.

  It had all been almost too simple, she felt, and she looked uneasily over her shoulder to see if she was being followed, but there was no sign of anyone who was at all interested in one stewardess among so many.

  So, she found a women’s lavatory and changed her uniform for the clothes she had brought ashore in a paper parcel and stuffed the uniform behind the cistern and went, empty-handed, through the customs shed, to meet Jay as arranged by the taxi rank.

  And there he was with the luggage and a grin on his face that threatened to split his cheeks and a hug and an exultant, ‘Wow, didn’t we fool ‘em? Didn’t we pull that one off?’ And she returned his hug and said nothing at all about the way he had taken all the credit for their safe arrival. The important thing was they had arrived. She was in New York, with the man she loved, and she was going to be married to him before she left the place. And she peered out of the cab window at the towering buildings she had only ever seen on cinema screens before and didn’t really believe it had happened.

  But it had.

  15

  October 1950

  It really felt rather good to be so tired. She was weary when she woke in the morning and as each hectic day went on she became even wearier, but it didn’t matter. She had never known such excitement in all her life, and it built up in her to create such a dreamlike state that she seemed to float her aching feet and tired muscles everywhere she went.

  The city itself was a major source of the strangeness. The first time she saw the Chrysler building with its extraordinary spire lit to a flaming bronze by the afternoon sun, she caught her breath at its strange yet so familiar beauty; and at the sight of Central Park where they rode in a horsedrawn cab, filled with trees burning with October fires of amber and gold, burnt umber and bronze and deep rich crimsons, she almost wept. But it wasn’t just the beautiful that dazzled and delighted her. There was also the cheap and the ugly, the garish and the vulgar, that were so filled with vitality that they doubled up the wild excitement inside her. To walk along Fifth Avenue and Broadway, Times Square and Forty-Second Street, to see the hot dog stalls, the delis and the automats and to see the great self-confident buildings clawing their arrogant way upwards was like walking into a film. It seemed to her as though at every other corner she might bump into Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, or Bette Davis and George Brent, and she revelled in that, actually watching the passers-by avidly for evidence of their film fame.

  But there were also the other things the films hadn’t told her about, like the smell of the city, petrol fumes and dirt and hot roast chestnuts and boiling frankfurters and mustard and onions from the stalls, and the heavy reek of the subway that came rolling out of the ground like the steam from the heating system gratings set in the roads; and the colour of New York, the subtle brick and stone tones slashed by violent reds and blues and greens as people in extraordinary clothes went scuttling by, together with the yellow cabs and the long rakish cars glittering with chrome and everywhere shop windows laden with goods. It was that as much as anything that tipped the strangeness over into fantasy; to see so many things, clothes and jewellery, furniture and linens, china and crystal and silver, so freely available after the long thin years of war followed by austerity in London made her mind flip sideways and lose any sense of reality.

  ‘We’ll stay at the Algonquin,’ Jay had said to her in the taxi taking them uptown from the pier. ‘It’s a very English hotel – you’ll feel at home there.’

  It wasn’t at all, of course. The menus, lusciously overloaded with incredible dishes, read like greedy fairy tales to her, and she ate buttery blueberry muffins and drank coffee full of real cream better than any she had ever tasted at breakfast, and had Waldorf salad and massive shrimps for lunch, and wondered what planked steak was and what sweetcorn might taste like for dinner, and then wandered through the dark leathery lobby with its brass bells on the small round tables and deep parchment lampshades and tried to compare it with the Ritz in London. And could find no points of contact. The Algonquin was, like everything else in her life now, new and exotic and wonderful and above all, gloriously exhausting.

  Jay was different too. Now he was on his own territory, he seemed far less new and exotic but still wonderful to her. He continued to be to her the most important person who ever breathed, the passion of her life, the one man who mattered, but there was no doubt that the uniqueness that had made him so remarkable in London was quite gone in New York. Every other man she looked at had his well-fed glossiness, his sleekness and air of total rightness, and most of them seemed to dress as he did, in what she discovered were Brooks Brothers’ shirts with button-down collars and beautifully pressed grey flannel suits and unbelievably glossy black shoes. She felt herself to be dowdy, suddenly, in spite of her Paris clothes, when she saw him alongside the girls of the town, in their sheer nylon stockings over incredibly high-heeled shoes and deliciously tailored little suits surmounted by wisps of veiling and silk and nonsense that were the hats that were all the rage this season.

  And that led to considerations of shopping and she thought about that greedily and counted her money, sadly depleted by the cost of her escape from the Mauretania, and told Jay she needed more.

  ‘If I’m to be Mrs Jay Kincaid, you’ll want to be proud of me,’ she said, as she snuggled into his chest one morning, revelling in the sheer physical pleasure of being able to share a bed with him instead of a hard rocking lifeboat. ‘After we sort out this morning about getting married, will you take me shopping? I want to know what you like, so you’ll have to choose –’

  ‘Married –’ he said and put up one hand to bury
his fingers in her hair, and twist the curls round, tugging gently in the way he knew she liked. ‘Listen, honey, why rush? I mean, let’s go to Boston, meet with the family –’

  She pulled away from him and sat up so sharply that his fingers tangled in her hair and it hurt as she pushed his hand down. ‘Jay! We talked about this. My father – I mean, he may be coming after us right now. If we’re not married he’ll – oh, I can’t bear to think what he might do to you. He must know by now it was you that had the money from those deals and not Ambrose – and if he gets his hands on you – I’ve seen him do terrible things to people when he’s angry. But if we’re married, there’ll be no problems, I promise you – I explained.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he mumbled and got out of bed and padded away to the bathroom and even in her anxiety she could not help but respond to the sight of his back with its smooth curves and planes and the way his buttocks, small and hard, fitted so elegantly into his thighs. Her skin crawled a little, even though they had made love only half an hour ago.

  ‘Yeah, I know what you mean – but listen, we’ll have breakfast, go shopping and then we’ll talk. I can’t now – too shagged.’ And at the bathroom door he turned and stood, arms akimbo and legs astride, displaying himself arrogantly. He grinned as her gaze inevitably shifted downwards and he jerked his pelvis towards her in an insolent inviting gesture so that his genitals swung lewdly and then ran to the shower as she came lunging towards him from the bed.

  They showered together, laughing a lot as they soaped each other and made as many lascivious movements and contacts as the small space allowed them, and went down to breakfast in great amity; but Maddie was still worried. She could almost feel the baleful influence of his family in Boston reaching across the miles – how many? She was hazy on that point – to touch and chill her and to spoil her success, and to come between her and her Jay. And that could not be borne.