The Would-Be Wife

by Annie Wilkinson

  ‘If we get there before you, we’ll save you a space at the hitching rail, Fred,’ Alec promised him, and started sailing north nose to wind, the only way to prevent her capsizing. With the wheelhouse constantly battered by heavy spray, peering ahead into the blizzard with his heart in his mouth he struggled to keep her afloat until they reached the fjord and the shelter of the mountains rising on either side of the inlet. The wind speed gauge moved steadily up the dial until it showed a hundred and twenty miles an hour, over gale force eleven. Judging by other voices coming over the radio the weather was the worst in living memory, and seemed set to get worse still – and around four hours of daylight was your lot up here, in February. The only good news was that the Chieftain’s radar was working.

  A warning from Wick coastal station that hurricane force winds were on the way came over the radio, followed by another message from the skipper of the Miranda. The Miranda still had no radar, but her skipper could just see the lights of the Chieftain, and intended following her to Isafjord.

  They ploughed through miles of the roughest seas Alec had ever experienced and reached Isafjord to find that at least twenty other ships had beaten them to it. Visibility was practically nil, but the radar indicated that the inlet was already packed to capacity. There was no safe anchorage, and even ships at anchor were violently battered by the storm. Hour after gruelling hour, snow, wind and spray combined to coat the ships with thick ice that the crews desperately chopped and heaved overboard in the attempt to stay afloat and alive, praying for the only thing that could help them – the end of the storm.

  Then a giant wave hit the Miranda. A plea came over the radio: ‘We are heeling over. Taking water, help us . . . Going over to starboard . . . can’t get her back . . . Love to our wives and families . . .’

  The Miranda was gone from the radar screen and there was nothing that the crew of the Chieftain could do to help her. The blizzard was so thick they could see neither coast nor mountains, nor any other ship. The mast was one huge, heavy, pillar of ice, which was also building up on the radar scanner. If that went, the ship would be completely blind.

  Chapter 42

  Lynn got to Margaret’s house bright and early the following morning, and hardly recognised her sister. Margaret was beautifully made up, with hair done – and without her headscarf. The smart two-piece suit she wore was covered by a borrowed fur coat for protection against the freezing cold.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ Lynn asked.

  ‘No. Well – just a bit. The taxi’ll be here in ten minutes; we’ve time for a cup of tea. I’ve left the lads in bed.’

  Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door. Lynn jumped up to answer it and there stood not the taxi man, but the man whose visits were dreaded by every fisherman’s family in Hessle Road.

  ‘Are you Mrs Stacey?’ he asked. ‘Jim Stacey’s wife?’

  ‘No, she’s inside. You’d better come in,’ Lynn said, and stood aside for the man who brought tears in his wake – the man from the Fishermen’s Mission.

  Margaret froze at the sight of him. Lynn sat beside her while he told her that the Miranda was lost with all hands. The news had come to Hull via Lloyd’s agent in Reykjavik, among other sources. There was no mistake, and no hope.

  ‘I knew it, I knew it, I knew it,’ Margaret kept repeating, holding on to her sides.

  ‘Is there anybody who can stay with her?’ the man from the Mission asked Lynn.

  ‘Me. I’m her sister.’

  Lynn heard Margaret’s lads getting up just as he was leaving, and the taxi was pulling up.

  ‘Oh, I can’t go. Tell him I can’t go, Lynn,’ Margaret cried.

  Lynn went out to the driver. ‘Go to Hull train station and tell the fishermen’s wives bound for London that Margaret’s just had some bad news. She can’t go with them. They’ll understand.’

  ‘The Miranda?’ he asked.

  Lynn nodded.

  ‘It’s all over the docks,’ he said, and drove off.

  Margaret was sitting with a hand protectively on her abdomen in the way common to all pregnant women, and Lynn wondered what her colour might be under all that carefully applied make-up. ‘He had a feeling,’ she said. ‘He never said anything, but I think that’s why he stayed at home so long this Christmas. He had a feeling.’

  A horrible eerie sensation overpowered Lynn. A feeling of doom, she thought – his own doom. It was uncanny how that happened to some fishermen.

  She shuddered. ‘Go back to bed, Margaret,’ she said. ‘I’ll see to the lads.’

  Margaret shook her head.

  Pointless arguing with her. Lynn switched the kettle on again and put bread in the toaster for the boys, who were already clattering down the stairs.

  ‘Has somebody been?’ asked young Jim, his father’s namesake.

  ‘Yeah, the taxi man, but your mam can’t go to London today. She’s not very well.’

  They stood looking at her, four beautiful boys, each about a head taller than the next youngest like steps and stairs, their faces serious, their eyes full of concern. ‘What’s the matter, Mam?’

  ‘What’s the matter, Mam?’

  Five-year-old Joe took her hand, and gazed into her eyes. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Margaret managed a smile for them. ‘I’m not very well,’ she repeated.

  ‘But you were going to Parliament!’ said young Jim.

  Lynn coaxed them away. ‘Come and get your breakfast, and I’ll take you to school,’ she said. ‘Your mam will be all right if she can just have a rest.’

  After they’d eaten Lynn sorted coats and gloves and set out with four quiet, bewildered youngsters, not at all sure that she was doing the right thing. Perhaps they should have been kept off school, perhaps they should have been told about their father’s ship, but she couldn’t bear to do it. And at least if they were at school they would be looked after for the day, freeing her to concentrate on their mother. At least they’d get some dinner, and by the time they came home she and Margaret would have decided on the best way to break the awful news.

  She saw them into school, and on the way back she thought of Margaret gasping and holding on to her sides – almost as if she had started in labour. But that was impossible. She wasn’t even six months pregnant, and all her other children had been overdue.

  Margaret was out of her chair when Lynn walked back in the house. ‘I’m having contractions,’ she said, with the certainty of a woman who knows what she’s talking about.

  Lynn was still unconvinced. ‘I don’t think you are,’ she said, ‘but you’ve had a terrible shock. I think you should go and lie down for a bit, and they’ll probably pass off. Go upstairs and get into bed. I’ll make you some tea, and a bit of toast, if you can eat it.’

  Margaret got to the fourth tread on the staircase, and stopped in her tracks, holding onto her sides. ‘Oohh!’

  ‘Oohh!’ Lynn had turned at the sound and repeated it, on seeing bright red blood running from Margaret and onto the stairs. ‘Oh, Margaret! Wait!’ she said, thoroughly alarmed. ‘Have you got any pads?”

  Margaret shook her head. Lynn quickly laid the newspaper and a couple of towels on the settee. ‘Lie there, with your feet up – and don’t move till I get back. I’m phoning the ambulance.’

  Margaret did as she was told, too frightened to do anything else.

  Lynn tore down the street to the nearest neighbour with a telephone, and rang the Obstetric Flying Squad, then raced back again thanking God for her midwifery training. She found Margaret almost collapsed and the towels covered in blood. The neighbour had followed, carrying more towels. Lynn washed the make-up off Margaret’s face the better to see her true colour, and put fresh towels under her. Twenty agonising minutes later the ambulance arrived.

  Five minutes after that, Margaret was lying on a stretcher in the ambulance with her pains coming every two minutes, and the doctor busy putting up a drip to counter the effect of the bleeding. Then they set off for the hospital, w
ith Lynn holding Margaret’s hand and feeling her knuckles crushed to a pulp when the pains were at their worst. Before they arrived at the hospital, Margaret had expelled two tiny, red, blood-streaked babies, neither bigger than the doctor’s hand, and both dead. Margaret looked bloodless. Even her lips were white.

  Lynn was more frightened than she’d ever been in her life. It looked as if her four nephews might lose their mother as well as their father, and who would care for them then? She would want to give them a home, but she had no money, and she would get absolutely no support from Graham. She knew that for a certainty.

  Lynn’s father answered the telephone. ‘Our Margaret’s in hospital,’ she told him. ‘She’s had a miscarriage.’

  ‘Does she know about Jim? It’s all over the docks – the Miranda’s gone down.’

  ‘Yeah. I think it was getting the news about Jim that caused the miscarriage. The doctors say it’s just a coincidence, but I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Doctors don’t know everything.’

  ‘No, and neither do midwives,’ Lynn said. ‘She told me she was having contractions, and I didn’t believe her. Is my mother there?’

  A moment or two later, Lynn’s mother was on the line. ‘We went down to see her as soon as we heard. We wondered where she was,’ Nina said.

  ‘She was supposed to have been going to London, and instead of that she had the man from the Mission, telling her Jim’s ship was lost – and then she had a bad haemorrhage and lost twins, a boy and a girl. I really thought she was going to bleed to death. God, what a nightmare.’

  ‘Where are you phoning from?’

  ‘Hedon Road Maternity.’

  ‘I’ll come straightaway.’

  ‘There’s no point. They’ve taken her to theatre to do a scrape, to stop the bleeding. I’m coming back now, to pick the lads up from school. I’ll ring Connie before I set off and tell her to hang on to Simon, and tell Graham where I am, then I’ll look after our Margaret’s lads so you can both go and see her in the hospital tonight.’

  But the boys were nowhere to be seen when Lynn went to collect them. They had been allowed to go home when the school heard about the fate of the Miranda. Lynn found them with one of Jim’s sisters further down the street, with pinched, anxious expressions on their faces. The news about their father’s ship had been devastating, and then they’d arrived home and found their mother gone. The youngest two had panicked and dissolved into tears both at the news of their father and the disappearance of their mother. The elder two had desperately tried to keep a stiff upper lip and comfort them – which had been more heartbreaking to see than the tears, Jim’s sister said.

  ‘Your mum’s in hospital,’ Lynn reassured them. ‘She’ll be there a few days, but they’ll make her better, and we’ll make sure you’re all right until she comes home.’

  ‘He was a good man, our Jim,’ she said. ‘A good brother and a good dad.’

  ‘I know,’ Lynn said. She stayed for half an hour, drinking tea and giving genuinely felt sympathy, then took the boys to her parents on Boulevard.

  After her parents had gone to the hospital she rang Graham, and found him at his mother’s house. ‘You’ll have heard about Margaret, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I hope she’ll be all right. Where are you now?’

  ‘Boulevard. My dad’s gone to see her. My mother’s gone with him. I’ve got the lads with me. There’s nobody else.’

  Lynn had been in two minds whether to mention her mother or not, but it barely seemed to register. ‘That’s all right,’ he told her. ‘We’ll stay at my mother’s. She can take Simon to school tomorrow.’

  He said all the right things, but there was something distant in his voice, as if he were making the correct responses by rote – as if it were a mere polite exchange between strangers. She decided to drop the bombshell.

  ‘Well, she won’t want to look after Simon for a week or more, and I don’t want to be away from him for that long either, so if nobody can help me with Margaret’s lads, I might have to bring them to stay with us, in Cottingham,’ she said, keeping her voice low so that they wouldn’t hear.

  That certainly woke Graham up, and there was nothing distant about his response to it. ‘No, I can’t say I favour that option,’ he protested. ‘It would be awful.’

  ‘Why would it be awful? It wasn’t awful on Bonfire Night.’

  ‘Only because their father was there, keeping them under control.’

  ‘Well they haven’t got a father now, and I might have to bring them,’ she insisted, ‘so you’ll have to keep them under control.’

  There was a long silence. ‘Well, if there’s no alternative, I suppose you’ll have to,’ he said, grudgingly, ‘but they’re nothing to do with me. I’ll be staying at my mother’s.’

  Chapter 43

  Her parents called in on their way back from the hospital, both uneasy about Margaret.

  ‘You should have put the lads to bed at our house,’ her mother said. ‘You could have gone home then.’

  ‘I’ll be all right. I’ll borrow one of Margaret’s nighties and sleep in her bed tonight,’ Lynn said, and thinking of getting home, added: ‘I suppose you’re still working, are you, Mam?’

  ‘’Course I am. I haven’t packed the job up.’

  Just the man, then, Lynn thought, so not available to look after four boys. It was obvious from her father’s expression and the way his brown eyes caught hers that the same thought was in his mind.

  ‘I might have to take the lads to stay with us in Cottingham, then, and keep them there until our Margaret’s a bit better,’ she said, ‘or bring Simon down here. He might miss a bit of school, but . . .’ she shrugged.

  ‘It’ll be a long time before our Margaret’s better, going by the look of her,’ her father said, thoughtfully. ‘I’ll miss a trip. I’ll stay here with ’em. I’ll make sure they get to school in the morning, and I’ll be here for ’em at night.’

  Lynn’s mother’s eyes widened. ‘What, sleep here?’ she said.

  ‘Aye, sleep here. I’ll go and sign off tomorrow, and sleep here until our Margaret’s fit to look after ’em herself. Best thing all round.’

  You’re an engineer, Dad, not a nursemaid, Lynn thought, struck by the way he was excluding her mother from his arrangements. ‘I’ll make us some tea,’ she said, and got up to put the kettle on, not daring to look at her mother’s face.

  ‘That’s crazy,’ her mother said. ‘They can come and sleep at our house.’

  ‘It’s not crazy. They’re going to sleep here, and I’m staying with ’em. Lynn’s going home tomorrow. That’s what’s going to happen, Nina,’ he said.

  It was certain the boys would be calmer sleeping in their own beds, among their own familiar things, Lynn thought, after her parents had gone. She sorted their clothes out for the wash while watching the progress of the headscarf revolutionaries on the news. They had done full credit to themselves and their city in London. They had achieved all they had set out to achieve. Those amazing women had accomplished more for their men in less than a month than either union or Members of Parliament had managed in years. All their demands had been met, and the owners were going to be made to put the proposed safety measures into immediate effect – whether they liked it or not. There would be radio operators on all the trawlers, proper safety checks, and a mother ship near the fleet with hospital facilities. It was breathtaking, a magnificent achievement, a tremendous victory – and despite Lynn’s unbounded admiration for them all, it left her feeling quite sick at heart, because it had all come too late for Jim, and because Margaret should have had a share in that triumph.

  She consoled herself with the thought that Anthony would benefit, and so would her father, despite his chauvinistic objection to women ‘meddling in men’s business’.

  And Alec, if he was still alive. The sudden fear that he might not be rippled through her insides like a river of ice.

  *

  In the calm after the sto
rm Alec was laughing, flooded by a feeling of pure exhilaration. To have come so close to death and to have escaped, to be alive and feel that life pulsing through every fibre was better than any other feeling he had ever known. Better than the big dipper at Blackpool, better than eight pints of lager, better than sex, better than anything he had ever experienced or could ever imagine. He’d passed the test. He felt invincible.

  Jackie felt it, and was laughing too. It had been a close shave; they’d come within a whisker of sinking – and escaped. Two trawlers had sunk and another had run aground, but the Chieftain had got away with it! She had nearly gone over, but after a heroic struggle she had righted herself and come away unscathed, with all her crew.

  The nervous little sparks, still white round the gills, was radioing the company to let them know they still had a ship. The skipper, almost sober, had just gone down to the chart room to try and make his mind up where the ‘fish shop’ was – those elusive, teeming shoals of profitable fish like cod and haddock. Soon they would be on course, on a two days’ steam to Bear Island, Alec guessed. Now all they had to do was make a trip – and hope it would be a good one.

  *

  Simon rushed out of school and into Lynn’s arms, smiling all over his face. ‘I’m glad you’re back, Mum.’

  ‘I’m glad I’m back, as well,’ she said. ‘I thought I was going to have to bring your Auntie Margaret’s lads with me, but your grandad’s decided he’s going to miss a trip and stay in their house and look after them till she’s better.’

  Simon’s face fell. ‘You should have brought them. I like playing with them. We could have made a snowman. We could have gone sledging.’

  ‘Well, maybe we can do that this weekend.’

  Back home, she left Simon watching the telly and went into the kitchen to ferret about in the fridge for three pork chops that she hoped would still be fit to eat. She sniffed at them suspiciously. They passed the smell test, but only just. She put them to soak in a bath of vinegar and water and started peeling potatoes and chopping cabbage. By the time Graham got home she had vacuum cleaned, dusted and set the table. He followed her into the kitchen, with Simon hard on his heels.