The Song and the Sea

by Isobel Chace

  Yes, he did! But did she want to be reminded of home? One could be homesick and yet not want to go home. Or was that too Irish an argument? She didn’t know. She sighed, wondering at her own confusion.

  “You’d have liked our house,” she told him shyly. “We couldn’t afford anything grand, but my mother was clever at making things look good and we were quite comfortable. She would put enormous bowls of flowers everywhere in the fireplaces and on the tables. It was heavenly.”

  Nick smiled at her.

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “My mother’s pretty good that way too.” He stood up and ran a friendly hand through her tousled hair. “You enjoy yourself with him while you can. Nobody minds.”

  No, she reflected bitterly, nobody minded! Nobody minded at all! She sipped at her tea, trying to hide the tears that had unaccountably come into her eyes. Was Nick blind that he didn’t know what it did to her when he touched her? Perhaps that was why he was suggesting that she should play with Jock and not get ideas.

  “We’re running out of water, by the way,” she told him baldly.

  He cursed softy under his breath, casting her a look of apology as he did so.

  “I thought we wouldn’t,” he admitted. “Oh well, we would have had to go back to Aden anyway for more compressed air, we’ll just have to put up with it.”

  Nobody was very pleased, but they accepted the inevitable philosophically, and by lunch time they were in sight of the Arab port.

  “I shall have my hair done,” Monique announced. “In this heat it will only last a few hours, but it will be wonderful to have a proper set for a change. Are you coming, Charlotte?”

  Jock gave a hoot of laughter.

  “Charlotte!” he exclaimed. “Can you imagine her under a hairdryer in this heat. You could have cut it, though,” he suggested. “A Yul Brynner cut?”

  She made a face at him.

  “I like it the way it is,” she defended herself. “It may be short, but it isn’t meant to look tidy.”

  “I like it too,” Nick put in. She looked at him sharply, her hand going involuntarily to her head, but he was once again intent on the list of supplies they needed.

  “And what about you, Dad?” she asked her father, to cover her confusion.

  Seamus gave the matter serious thought.

  “I like most girls to look feminine and to have lots of hair, but it suits you all right to wear it short.”

  Monique’s eyes mocked them both.

  “Tiens, quel tact!” she drawled. “Seamus, my love, you improve!”

  Charlotte hadn’t really thought her serious in her intention to go to a hairdresser, but when they at last sailed into Aden that was exactly what she did do. Jock and Seamus volunteered to get the water and petrol on board and to collect further supplies of air and the mail from the Army.

  “That leaves us to buy the groceries,” Nick grinned at Charlotte. “Put on your prettiest dress , and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee!”

  In her cabin she paused in front of her dressing-table and picked up her coral rose, caressing the petals gently. Her prettiest dress? Well, why not? With anxious hands, she searched among her frocks until she came to her favorite, one with a wide skirt and with a pattern of embroidery on the bodice. Quickly, she slipped it over her head and brushed her short hair until it shone. She pushed her feet into the nearest pair of sandals, but the thought of Monique’s new shoes made her change her mind and she took out another pair that she had bought in Paris and wore them instead.

  Nick was waiting for her on deck, and she ran up the companionway towards him, a little shy of him because it seemed so odd to be in a skirt again and not in the jeans that both she and Monique wore continuously on board.

  “I’m ready,” she told him a little breathlessly.

  He turned and looked at her.

  “So I see,” he said dryly.

  She was not bluffed by his tone of, voice, though she knew he was pleased that she had gone to some trouble with her appearance, and she knew that he liked her dress quite as much as she had herself.

  A tentative smile curled the corner of her lips.

  “Do I get my cup of coffee?” she asked, peeping up at him through her eyelashes.

  His hand caught hers and he began to walk her across to the gangway.

  “I can see I shall have to be on my best behavior,” he said. “That dress does things to you!”

  To you, or for you, did he really mean? She followed him lightly down the steps and stepped demurely into the tender. She could see Jock and her father staring down at her and she waved cheekily at them, her cheeks a pretty shade of pink because masculine admiration was still very new to her.

  Nick untied the painter himself, leaning over her to do so. She sat very still, scarcely daring to breathe. He had put on a clean shirt himself, she noticed, made of towelling. The back of the collar was just beginning to go, and she longed to offer to mend it for him, but she knew if she did he would only pass it off in some way. Monique did his mending. She knew that because she had seen her darning a man’s sock in the privacy of her cabin, as though the very action was somehow precious to her.

  He helped her out of the boat too when they reached the jetty, with a confident hand under her arm that allowed her no chance of slipping. She gave a quick skip of pleasure and smiled up at him.

  “Where are we going first?” she demanded.

  He was smiling too.

  “Work first, pleasure afterwards,” he decreed. “First we’ll shop and get the orders sent down to the boat, and then—” he paused “—and then we’ll see!” he promised.,

  Shopping with Nick was fun. Neat and orderly as always, he had brought a list with him stating exactly what thing's they needed. He knew exactly how much he was prepared to pay for each article and would argue over a few pice as patiently as any of the other traders. What a poker player! It was impossible to tell from his face just when he would give way and accept an offer. The merchants eyed his face anxiously, but they learned nothing. With broad grins they would try to push up the price just that little bit more, but they were careful, never knowing when he turned his back whether he was indeed going away.

  Fruit and frozen vegetables, meat and groceries, all were neatly packaged and were borne away almost before they could be paid for, down to the wharves so that they could be hurried on board before they spoiled.

  “We’re doing this at the wrong time of day,” Nick told her. “Most of the good stuff has gone. When it’s as hot as this, most people do their marketing before breakfast.”

  Afterwards they wandered through the bazaar, admiring the multi-colored cottons, the pretty women and the grubbing goats with fine impartiality. Nylon had come to the East, Charlotte saw. Many of the Indian saris, hung up to attract the Indian women, were obviously “drip-dry” and edged with machine-made motifs that were not at all the same as the traditional fine handwork that she had come to expect.

  Every now and then they saw a stall set up by some enterprising person out to catch the trade of the hillsmen. With no more than a target made of cardboard, they would set up business, and entice the local “Shots” to try their luck. For a few pice anyone could try to hit the target, but few were rewarded by the little flare of gunpowder that marked a hit. A reassuring sight, as far as Charlotte was concerned, considering the number of people who carried guns.

  At this time of day the coffee shops were crowded. Business men met and carried on long and whispered conversations. Lovers met too, with a mixture of gaiety and intensity that often degenerated into violent quarrels.

  Nick found a table out in the street, well shaded from the sun by the building behind it.

  “I don’t know if you’ll like the coffee,” he said. “It can be very strong and bitter.”

  She had to admit that she didn’t very much. But she liked the sweetmeats that went with it, even though she had no idea what they were. And she was fascinated by the, hennaed butterfly-hands of the Arab
girl who served them.

  For once she wouldn’t have minded if Nick had flirted with her, but now that the shopping was done, she felt that he would really have liked to get back to the Sea Fever and to work. The afternoon was nearly over and she didn’t want it to end. She would have liked it to go on for ever.

  “Do you think Monique’s hair will be finished yet?” she asked as at last they got up to go, unable to drink any more of the black Arabian coffee.

  He tucked her hand into his arm and smiled down at her.

  “Shall we play truant for the evening?” he suggested. “We can go and look at the famous tanks and see the camels being fed. Would you like that?”

  She bit her lip.

  “If you really want to go,” she said.

  He pushed back her hair from her forehead and kissed her lightly on the nose.

  “I really want to,” he assured her. “Shall we go?’

  She saw the tanks in a kind of dream. Someone told her that they held more than twenty million imperial gallons, but she couldn’t have cared less. Nick had kissed her—a kiss so gentle it might have been no more than the touch of a moth, nevertheless he had kissed her. She climbed the steep steps above the tank and came down again by the Parsees’ Tower of Silence, but even that melancholy sight, despite the fact that no one seemed to have died recently, failed to depress her.

  Nick also insisted that she should see the little cemetery where lie the soldiers of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry who fell at the capture of Aden. She read the verse dedicated to their memorial:

  It dawns in Asia, tombstones show

  And Shropshire names are read;

  And the Nile spills his overflow

  Beside the Severn’s dead.

  Aden. Another part of Britain's casually collected Empire, that she had conquered almost by accident and had spent her best blood defending, educating and sometimes losing. Charlotte felt stupidly sentimental, but in that moment she was glad she was English.

  The afternoon was changing to evening when they walked across the hills and watched the herdsmen feeding their camels. They sat them down in a semicircle facing them, as though they were on the point of telling them a bedside,, story, a large pile of millet and maize stalks beside them, which they pushed, handful by handful, into each camel’s mouth.

  The few scrappy trees, really no more than thin bushes, threw odd, sinister shadows across the ground and it became rapidly cooler. The day was coming to an end. In the distance they could hear an Arab shepherd playing his shrill pipes, and then there was silence; even the last red rays of the sun were drying away.

  “We’d better go back,” Nick said with a sigh. “They’ll think we’re lost and be sending out a search party for us.”

  The streets were emptier than they had been and, apart from the modern new town, rather dark. Charlotte walked very close to Nick and was glad when he put his arms round her.

  “Are we flirting now?” he asked her as they paused at a corner.

  She smiled, tilting up her face to look at him.

  “I don’t know, Nicki.”

  “Well, I do,” he said.

  He put both arms round her and kissed her properly.

  “How was that?” he asked.

  She savored it for a moment.

  “I liked it,” she said.

  “Could you do with more of the same?”

  She shook her head regretfully.

  “It wouldn’t be fair, would it? Let’s go home.” She could only just see his eyes in the darkness—beautifully shaped eyes that she would remember for ever. She could feel his hands on her shoulders and he gave her a little shake.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll leave it at that for now.” And they walked contentedly on to the jetty, still hand in hand.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Monique had sorted the mail for her, leaving two piles on her bunk, one for her and the other Nick’s business letters waiting to be answered. Charlotte turned her own letters over without much interest. They all of them bore New Zealand stamps and were probably from the friends she had made at school or during the short time she had spent training in Auckland. But when she looked closer she saw that one of them was from her mother’s solicitors, and she opened that one first, wondering what on earth further they could have found to write to her about.

  It was quite brief. Probate had been granted on her mother’s estate and they were sending the money to a bank in London. They would be glad if she would confirm its arrival and also if she would let them knew as soon as she started her training, as in her mother’s will it had been laid down that they were to be her trustees and to pay the money over to her only on that condition.

  She ought to answer it and post it to them if she could before they left Aden, she supposed, but it was difficult to know what to say. She thought of the solicitor as she had last seen him. Not, the dry, precise man of law she had expected, but a vigorous Englishman in his early forties who had long ago fallen under her mother’s spell and had found her daughter surprisingly dowdy beside her.

  Then there had been the shock of discovering that she had a father. She remembered the tinge of disapproval that had entered the solicitor’s voice at the mention of him, and how he had piously hoped that Seamus would do nothing to upset the will.

  But he had. Though not in the way that might have been expected of him. He had taught his daughter that there was more to life than singing, that there was a whole world all around her, waiting to be explored. Or had Nick taught her that? It didn’t matter very much. It was enough to know that he suddenly found the prospect of the endless scales and the rigid care of her throat that she had known since childhood downright boring. And the money had only been left to her on condition that she continued her training.

  Automatically she opened the rest of the mail and read the letters. What should she answer? They would expect her to be already at work, not working as secretary to a deep-sea expedition of which, she was very sure, they had never heard.

  She heard Pahad beating on the back of the frying-pan, calling them to supper. He would have liked to have a proper gong, which he considered essential to his dignity as cook, and had looked longingly at the ship’s bell. It had taken Nick’s stern eyes to dissuade him from actually ringing that! Ever since he had improvised with the frying-pan, accompanying the raucous clatter with a hurt expression in his liquid brown eyes. Charlotte put the letters down and went along to the saloon. Perhaps afterwards she would have the opportunity of talking to her father about it, and the thought gave her a pleasant feeling inside. She had never before had anyone with whom she could discuss things like that. Her mother had always made the decisions, she had never listened to what her daughter had to say.

  Monique was already seated at the table when she entered. The hairdressers had not set her hair very well, Charlotte thought. They had brushed it out too early, allowing it to frizz out into a multitude of kinky curls.

  “You and Nick have a good time?” the French girl asked with saccharine sweetness.

  Charlotte nodded, uncomfortably aware that she was blushing a little.

  “We waited to see the camels being fed,” she explained uneasily.

  Monique shrugged her shoulders in an elaborate Gallic gesture.

  “Your father might have preferred some explanation,” she said coldly. “He has seen very little of you these last few days.” Her face clouded a little. “He thinks it is because of Jock, but you and I know better, hein?”

  Yes, they both knew better, Charlotte agreed inwardly. They both wanted Nick, it was as simple as that.

  “I do not like to see Seamus unhappy,” Monique went on with difficulty. “It is not easy for me to say this, you understand, but I think he would like to know that it would be him you would turn to in any trouble.”

  Charlotte could hear the men’s footsteps overhead, coming towards the companionway. It was difficult to believe that only that evening she had allowed Nick to take her in hi
s arms and kiss her. Allowed? No, that wasn’t the word at all! She had wanted him to kiss her.

  “Whom else should I turn to?” she asked lightly.

  Monique’s eyes met hers across the table. “Nick?” she suggested. “I think you would choose Nick. Can you say you would not?”

  Charlotte’s eyes fell away and she shook her head.

  “No,” she said, “I can’t.”

  The men read their letters while they ate. Sometimes they would read a passage aloud to the others amid great gales of laughter. Nick and Seamus especially seemed to be in a very good humour, and Charlotte wondered what had passed between them on deck that had pleased them both so much. Some masculine joke, she supposed, not considered fit for their womenfolk’s ears. Both Nick and Seamus were oddly old-fashioned in that way. They seldom swore or told risqué stories with ladies present.

  “I’ve given Liam orders to sail tonight,” Nick announced as he put down his last letter. He smiled at Seamus. “I didn’t think you’d appreciate being in port tomorrow.”

  Seamus laughed.

  “Not much!” he admitted.

  “That will be another year gone!” Monique exclaimed, and bit her lip. “Oh, I am sorry. You are right. It is stupid to make too much of dates and things, but it is so difficult to realize that you will be forty-six tomorrow. It seems so much older than forty-five!”

  “You don’t have to tell me that!” Seamus chuckled at her.

  Charlotte gazed at them all in dismay.

  “Your birthday?” she demanded. “Oh, why did no one tell me? Oh, Dad, I didn’t know!”

  There was a sudden silence in the saloon.

  “I didn’t know!” she repeated.

  Nick’s hand covered both hers in quick sympathy.

  “Don’t take it so to heart,” he said. “Seamus would probably have rather we all had forgotten.” But Charlotte was not to be comforted. What kind of a person was she anyway not even to have taken the trouble to find out the date of her own father’s birthday?

  From her bunk she got the oddest view out of the porthole. Sometimes she could see a great strip of red light Where the port navigation light was reflected in the sea, and then, in the next minute, she could see nothing but the moon and the stars in the milky sky. It must be quite rough for them to be rolling so much, she thought, and there was more than enough wind for them to be using the sails, for the engine was quite silent. She must have slept for a short time, for she could remember dreaming of trying to feed a camel, desperately pushing the straw into its mouth through its split lip, while it had watched her, its eyes full of nothing but contempt.