Into Suez

by Stevie Davies

  It was the girl with the hot water bottle. Mona Serafin. The name echoed back from wherever it had lodged. Her surname was now Jacobs but I call myself Serafin-Jacobs, double-barrelled. Who wants to give up her own name, I ask you?

  They stared, eyes on stalks, giggling, clutching one another. They were back in the war, the party wall breached at last. The women’s eyes glistened with the glow of memory.

  This was how Nia found them as she was lugged back in disgrace from her tour of the ship. Out of control, Mrs Grey said – and quite honestly the staff had better things to do than go chasing round after disobedient girls.

  ‘Mami!’ Nia cried, bursting into dramatic sobs. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘I hope you’re feeling better, Mrs Roberts, because you will have to look after her yourself from now on. You’ve not been smoking of course, ladies. In the cabin.’

  ‘Oh dear – have one yourself.’ Mona offered the carton. ‘Please do.’

  Mrs Grey reddened. She addressed herself exclusively to the mother. The kiddie would have to go back to leading reins if she couldn’t behave properly. Leading reins! How would a big girl like that?

  ‘I’ve been in the hangar.’

  ‘Did she say hangar?’

  ‘A big sick bowl with hundreds of men in it.’

  ‘She’s making it up.’

  ‘Hanging. In the air. I was looking for the aeroplane.’

  Nia scrambled on to the bottom of the bunk and wormed her way up the gap between her mother and the wall. Stuffing the centre of her cot sheet into her mouth, she tossed the rest of it over her face, a flannel veil, and breathed the moist, self-scented, off-white world that accompanied her wherever she went. Ailsa knew Nia feared nothing once she was in her pod.

  Mrs Grey explained that Nia had found her way to the troop deck where the soldiers were housed. Yes, in a state of abject squalor, Mona said, it was a disgrace. They were only young boys, many of them conscripts, and they were treated like scum. Typical British idea of democracy: a few dozen officers swanning around in two thirds of the ship and five hundred human beings living like pigs in the hold. Mrs Grey sat plumb down on a bunk and stared, rhubarb-red, saying she found that a novel view and quite an interesting one. That fighting men should expect the conditions of a luxury liner, well well. However would we have won the war if such a cushy doctrine had prevailed?

  ‘And your daughter could so easily have fallen to her death,’ she told Ailsa, gently now, for the mother had gone rather pale. She made it clear that she placed the blame squarely on Wing Commander Jacobs’s wife, to whom she referred as a ‘visiting officer’.

  ‘Oh, please, Mrs Grey – don’t embarrass me. I’m just a civilian woman like anyone else.’

  ‘We take our husbands’ rank, of course.’

  ‘Oh no, really.’

  Officers’ wives, however out of line they got, could not be attacked from below. She’ll go for me when you’re not here, thought Ailsa, so shush, do: it’s me, not you, who’ll be in the dog house. In Ailsa’s mind’s eye, Nia swayed high up on a platform. She lost footing, she tripped, she pitched down into the abyss. Ailsa wrapped her arms round her daughter’s body, warm through the cotton, and hugged her close.

  Mona raised the question of the monograms on the sheets. ‘They can’t be swastikas, surely?’

  They were, and some younger women had already taken the law into their own hands and snipped the vile things out with decent English nail scissors. Mrs Grey, at last in agreement with the Wing Commander’s uppity wife, said something must be done. No doubt about that. After the war the ship had been requisitioned, lock, stock and barrel, from the German navy and converted, with the least possible expense, to British use. The Reichsemerald had become the Empire Glory. She was due to be broken up after this voyage. Mrs Grey left them on reasonably amicable terms. Thank heaven, thought Ailsa.

  The Wing Commander’s wife patted her lap, inviting Nia to climb up and have a Wagon Wheel and Corona. The child needed no encouragement. She cradled her beaker, smiling over the rim, sipping and jingling the ice cubes. Mona presented her full face, gravely attentive. She seemed to loom, all eyes, at Nia, who stared straight back

  ‘Lady,’ she said. ‘You need a damn good wash, my girl.’

  Ailsa’s face flamed; Nia meant, she knew, (but did Mona cotton on?) Mona’s dark skin.

  Without batting an eyelid, Mona explained that she was meant to be like this. You should be happy with who you are, she explained. Always.

  ‘So let me touch it then.’

  ‘Go on – that’s fine.’

  Most delicately, Nia stroked the dark lady’s face with the backs of her fingers. A beautiful look stole into her eyes, an expression caught from her father. She cupped Mona’s chin in both palms and nuzzled noses. Then she gave her a kiss, breaking through every convention into an intimacy that was its own courtesy. Ailsa saw how struck the woman was – the childless woman, who mirrored back Nia’s unembarrassed gaze, dark eyes swimming. Mona looked, Ailsa thought, amazed and sad. But she’d have her own kiddies one day. And then this ocean of simple love that blessed them would be an everyday given of her existence too. The bliss it has been, Ailsa thought, to be your mother, Nia. The thought rocked her.

  Tranquil, Ailsa’s daughter sat in the stranger’s lap, humming to herself, her thin ginger hair and pale skin making a strong contrast with Mona’s darkness as she folded a shy arm around Nia’s middle. It was an episode of extraordinary peace. Ailsa of course had to spoil it with her nerves. She came in with, ‘Nia is the limit, she really is. Oh, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘She can only know what the world tells her.’ Mona nuzzled the top of Nia’s head with her chin.

  ‘Mona, I didn’t…’

  ‘Course you didn’t. Unfortunately, Ailsa, you aren’t the world.’

  No, I’m its tannoy, Ailsa thought, ashamed, as they left the cabin to go up to the mess. Its wireless set.

  Babs Brean sang out, ‘Still green round the gills, Mrs Roberts? Better eat while you can. Wait till you get to the Bay of Biscay!’

  She winked at a bleached woman, with whom she’d struck up an instant and intimate acquaintance. Bosom pals they’d become in a trice and it seemed to Ailsa as if the women had all sought out partners in whom to stow their secrets, so that they could anchor themselves in gossip on the lurching world of the Empire Glory. They walked about coupled like the animals in the Ark. And just as easily as they’d fallen into step, these sudden little unions would be dissolved when they set foot on dry land.

  And Mona and she were the same, but caught up in a past, which lay around them like a strangely glowing mist. It’s you, it’s really you, Ailsa thought and in her mind the relationship they’d almost had took on an aura of mystery and meaning. The memory of the day she’d realised that the next door girls had left the Old Brewery returned with exaggerated significance, as if it had marked an epoch in her life. Oh those girls: their philosophy and emotionalism, their all-night parties and the operatic arias in the bath. They’d vanished – but at first she’d hardly noticed. She’d been married by then, to Joe who was everything. All Ailsa’s passion had poured into her only-just-consummated marriage. But when Hitler had thrown the doodlebugs at London, Ailsa had looked up in mid-word, fountain pen in hand, from writing to her husband in Italy – and registered her neighbours’ absence.

  She’d known then, known for sure, that she was about to die. The rattling rocket halted over her head. A moment of pure evil. You had a few seconds until it blew you apart. Ailsa’s mind had flicked sideways to the neighbouring flat. Empty! As empty as it had been for days, weeks. She’d hardly missed the girls’ bright presence. No time for any valedictions. Alone, she was alone.

  She heard the doodlebug hit – someone else. Oh, thank you, God.

  Now she learned that the girls had left the Old Brewery when they’d had enough of being glorified secretaries at the Ministry. Mona and Bobbie had joined the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Adm
inistration, resettling slave workers and concentration camp victims. At first Mona had worked from an office in Birmingham; then at the end of the war she’d been drafted to Lübeck in North Germany. Met up again with her old man and married him.

  ‘We thought you so glamorous in those days, Ailsa, I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Me glamorous! You can’t be serious.’

  ‘You’ve no idea how we used to discuss you and speculate on what it was you did and who exactly you were.’

  ‘You’re joking.’ Ailsa grinned, liking the idea. Obviously they’d glamorised her young isolation, casting her as a figure dauntlessly modern, who went her own way and exemplified some kind of unreal Zeitgeist.

  ‘We decided you were a spy! Were you a spy?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  They giggled. A spy was just about it, although what you witnessed from your window was bound to be skewed. As what they’d seen of her was skewed. Perspective conferred mystery – and especially to those ultra-educated types, whose whole minds were occupied with cerebral romance – thinking about Thought, existentially in love with Sartre and de Beauvoir, names she’d caught from nextdoor and looked up in Marylebone Library. Ailsa’s shy solitude had turned her into a storybook girl for those gilded Oxford types, ignorant of the fact that her lack of a single pair of nylons could reduce Ailsa to tears, as she pulled on lisle stockings lumpy with darns or went bare-legged. They wouldn’t have minded bare legs. Bohemians didn’t. For they could have dressed from head to foot in silk if they’d liked. They’d never have fathomed that Ailsa struggled to summon courage to order fish and chips in the Corner House. They’d seen a modern girl who walked alone – and not only straddled a bike but understood its innards, sleeves rolled up like a mechanic and oil to the elbows. They’d heard her whistling perhaps, for at times (and how could Ailsa have forgotten this?) she really had felt like that – a free spirit.

  No mother of a dependent child could dream or claim such licence. The Wing Commander’s lady wife would soon see through her. For now I am prosaic, she thought ruefully. And yet, accepting a cup of cocoa from the urn, sipping to see if it would stay down, a rebellious spirit spoke up in Ailsa. I am not the common run. Anyone with eyes can see that.

  In the reassuring hubbub of women’s and children’s voices, she chatted to an Irene and a Hedwig, one of the German brides the boys had brought home after the war. The Allies had been forbidden to fraternise with the defeated enemy in his – and her – misery. But how could they fail to fraternise? A word too sexless for what was bound to happen. The boy-soldiers were young and human, and once the killing had ceased, how could they be otherwise than on the side of life and sex and birth – and of pity? Ailsa dreaded to think what Hedwig’s married life had been like, stranded amongst the insular, Jerry-hating English. She itched to try out some of her German.

  ‘Chopsticks’ echoed from the piano, an out-of-tune grand of all things. Mona craned and said it was a Blüthner, concert grand, the real thing, taken over presumably with the vessel from the German Kriegsmarine.

  ‘Do you play?’ Ailsa asked her.

  ‘Not nowadays, no, I don’t,’Mona said dismissively, and without asking whether Ailsa played. Ailsa didn’t like to boast. She smiled down at Nia, who was being good as gold.

  Nia snuggled against her mother’s arm, thumb in mouth, her admiration and pride unreserved. No one else had this mother, only Nia. And she didn’t have to share her. This soft-haired lady, willowy and tall, with the special clean smell even under her arms, the shirt-waisted blue dress decorated with flowers in white circles. This one and only. Nia’s, forever.

  ‘We’ll have singsongs on the voyage, I’ve no doubt,’ Babs said. ‘Look at your daughter, Mrs Roberts. She’s eaten up half her bread while you weren’t looking. There’s a good girl, dear. You see, you were hungry, after all!’

  Nia glared. She’d been playing a game of pinching the triangles of bread into moist particles between thumb and finger. The rhythm of the game had been soothing and she was put out at the interruption. Having unconsciously fed herself the bread, Nia was annoyed to have her conformity exposed. Spoilt brat, women’s expressions said. Babs proposed to make tracks: tombola and a drinkie later for the grown-ups. Her daughters whined and thumped off flat-footedly in her wake. Nia’s face said, Bossy. Then she could be seen to think, Big Bum, as Mrs Brean turned to shepherd her flock to the cabin. She grinned over her cocoa. Love for Ailsa brimmed.

  ‘You got cocoa all round your mouth, Mami,’ she said, and with a forefinger gently drew a mirroring outline round her own lips. ‘A moustache.’ She added, thoughtfully, ‘Darling.’

  ‘You have a pearl, Ailsa,’ said Mona. ‘A little pearl. I’m so glad we caught up with one another.’

  Eyebrows twitched as the ragamuffin received this fulsome praise. Ailsa dabbed cocoa away from Nia’s mouth, proud that Mona saw her daughter’s quality. Not everyone did. To be frank, she didn’t always. Nia could be so odd. But in Mona’s world, ‘odd’ was good, or likely to be. ‘Even’ was dull and despicable. Ailsa prepared to tell Joe what Mona had said. You know the lady on the troopship, Joe? She told me Nia was a pearl.

  *

  The pearl was put to bed with the others in the cabin. She settled down happily after their whispered prayers, the mothers taking turns to babysit. The released women applied lipstick and left for the deck.

  Ailsa watched the pale wake ploughed by the ship in the blackness of the sea. The quiet, nervous Irene stood with Ailsa at the rail, wringing lilac gloved hands as she stared homeward. Ailsa asked how her boys were: two white-blond seraphs who kept close to their mother, attached wherever she went, impeding progress. What an immaculate family they were, all appearing just-ironed. Irene White seemed a woman created out of fear, detecting germs on cup lips, kiddies’ fingers, taps. She gazed plaintively at Ailsa and spoke of the worrying state of the lavatories. Christopher and Timothy had gone off to sleep, rather against their better judgement, she said, with a small reserved smile. When Mona appeared with her husband, Irene shrank from the towering officer and could scarcely speak.

  Ailsa smiled into dark, diffident eyes: the Wing Commander stooped and slouched as if in pathological apology for his outlandish height. Older than Mona, fortyish perhaps? In love with her from the crown of her head to her toes. He deferred unashamedly to his wife. Ailsa liked him for that. Dark rippling hair, very thick and bushy: she could just hear Joe murmuring, Hair cut, you! He looked Jewish. Of course, that would be it: Mona must be Jewish too. Call me Ben. How did a high ranking officer not know that she couldn’t possibly? The Wing Commander was a medic, a psychologist. His unkemptness was truly breathtaking: shirt button open at the neck, a general air of unruly sweetness. Something to do with status, no doubt; no one could call a high-ranking officer to account and demand that he adopt a military bearing.

  ‘Surely you recognize Ailsa, Habibi?’ Mona said. ‘The gorgeous girl on the motorbike. You do, of course you do.’

  He didn’t and neither did the blond conscript officer, Alex, although both had been frequent visitors at the Old Brewery, among the young men tumbling in and out of love with Ailsa’s neighbours. Free love, Ailsa had supposed, fascinated, mildly scandalised. For in those days she’d half expected to settle for poor Archie in the end and go home to her cousin, the Quaker Meeting and the warmly humdrum farm. The patrician young men at the Old Brewery had fascinated Ailsa: they all seemed to upset each other terribly, and to need to discuss it and make it worse. Disturbance rolled round like thunderstorms. It was always the end of the world – or the dawn of a new age. Occasionally a couple of sensitive but combative young philosophers would be heard in passionate debate through the open window, about Plato, as they claimed, but really about some girl they both loved. Their friendships with one another also seemed lived on the level of romance: an eros presumably without sensuality, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets to his Young Man.

  The bombs fell and the skyline glowed with fire. Houses w
ere reduced to rubble or left standing like shattered obelisks, landmarks on which, as years between the Blitz and the doodlebugs passed, grass and purple fireweed rooted. The high-ranking boy officers went off to be maimed or die in Libya or Albania. And their poetry went with them.

  ‘We’re taking turns to keep watch over the kiddies,’ Mona told her husband. ‘It’s first watch now. Then we’ve got second. So we can’t stick around later than nine.’

  ‘Oh but you don’t have to, Mona,’ Ailsa said.

  ‘Maybe, but I want to.’

  Winy gaiety sparkled. It was an adventure, a lark, after all, going East. It pepped Ailsa up as if a route had opened up back to the daredevil despatch girl, licensed to break the Highway Code and mount the pavement if necessary. Back then any evening might have been your last. The ruins stank of rotting flesh; teemed with fresh ghosts. So you’d give life a run for its money. What wouldn’t Ailsa Birch have given for a chance to sail to the Orient, in the wake of all the Memsahibs and diplomats, civil servants and engineers, pukka worthies and unworthies?

  An odd little scene took place in the women’s mess, around the concert grand. The Wing Commander coaxed his wife to sit on the piano stool and try out the instrument. Go on, darling. Just for me. Mona’s face closed up. She sat stiffly and rested her fingers on the keys. Ailsa, aware of a painful pause, saw her lip quivering and thought: Oh no, she’s going to cry. She slid on to the stool beside Mona.

  ‘Squeeze up, cariad,’ she said, as easily as if the obscurely suffering girl had been a large-scale version of Nia. ‘Let’s try a duet.’

  Not to shine in the company of a concert pianist, however rusty, came as no dishonour to the star pupil, Grade 8, of Mr Ernest Beaver at the Abbey Grammar School, Shrewsbury. They romped through a bagatelle and tangled fingers over a Mozart duet with impromptu syncopations. By and by Ailsa withdrew and let Mona storm into Beethoven’s Hammerklavier: a stunning parody of it, rather, for the out-of-tune instrument boomed and jangled. Through soft passages throbbed the engine of the Empire Glory.