Which he wouldn’t. It would all have to end, she was clear about that, when the Empire Glory docked. For the time being: why not?
Officers enjoyed luxurious comfort. Easy to make oneself at home in the peace and privacy of the Jacobs cabin. On the last morning before Malta, Ailsa let herself in. Mona, showering in the cubicle, was performing ‘Stella by Starlight’ at the top of her voice, a one-girl jazz band of improvisations, while she lathered furiously with the salt water soap that raised few bubbles and left you skinned over with a slimy layer when you towelled dry.
Her powder-blue nightie lay in a heap of silk. Ailsa folded the garment, tucking it under Mona’s pillow. An intimate action, sisterly. I’ve fallen in friendship, she thought. And that’s that. And there was a closeness with Ben: his open manner set Ailsa at ease in a way she wasn’t used to with men. Was that charm or was it sincerity?
Beside the bed stood a photo of the couple working with the UN refugee unit in Lübeck after the war, repatriating prisoners and slave labourers. In a drab uniform a size too small for her, bursting out all over the place like a schoolgirl, Mona stood unsmiling and workmanlike, sleeves rolled up, beside her husband. Ailsa thought of the two Jews finding their soul mates in those ruins. The marriage couldn’t be more than a couple of years old, younger than hers and Joe’s, which perhaps explained why there were no children yet. Ailsa was touched by the tenderness of husband and wife, showing their affection as the most natural thing in the world; flattered by their inclusion of her. By Mona’s confidences and Ben’s gratitude, for he seemed to credit Ailsa with nothing less than restoring her music to Mona’s hands.
He told Ailsa more about Mona’s musical career. She’d been a pupil of the great Julie Brandt-Simon at the Brussels Conservatoire. Julie had been a second mother to her. When the Serafin family had come to London, the pianist on a visit to Britain attended a concert performance by the fourteen-year-old prodigy; she’d written to Mona’s mother: Bring your daughter to me and leave her until she comes of age: there is still time for me to correct her errors. That had ended in tragedy. After Mona had returned to Britain, her teacher was taken into custody by the Nazis. Mona’s gift deserted her. For Ailsa the thought of having somehow restored it was wonderful. But perhaps Mona had been nearly ready to play already; any catalyst would have done?
No, and he was writing a poem about it, Ben had said. When it was finished, she might like to have a copy?
‘Oh, I would. Nobody’s ever written me a poem before.’
Who wouldn’t have been awed, flattered? At home Ailsa’s collection of nineteen records contained three Brandt-Simon renderings of late Beethoven. The record sleeves showed a sharp-featured elderly woman, hair scraped into a grey bun: in her sixties a power house of a woman with pale, unsmiling eyes. You wouldn’t want to cross her.
Mona was now into ‘That Old Black Magic’. Ailsa shouted to her but she didn’t hear through the mad racket of her singing.
Whatever did Mona see in Ailsa, for all her leaven of learning? Nothing Ailsa said ever seemed banal to Mona. Tell me it all, she’d order. Hold nothing back. Ailsa would laugh: what could there be to hold back? Her life was mundane. The post office, the farm, her war work, marriage and bringing Nia into the world. But she found herself confiding more intimately about Archie and Joe: out it all came, quite private things. As you might with a sister. It was not betrayal.
The singing got louder, then ceased, and the water was turned off. Mona came out of the shower naked, looking for her wrap, dripping all over the floor. Ailsa gasped, blushed, laughed, swerved her eyes.
Mona grabbed her and swept her round the cabin, singing ‘Night and Day’: You, only you under the sun! Mona smouldered and sashayed till Ailsa hurt with laughter. I think of you, night and day. She kissed Ailsa softly on the mouth and let her go. For several minutes the trace of the kiss lingered, tingling like peppermint.
*
In the Mediterranean lassitude the women collapsed on the sun deck like a colony of seals. Ailsa lay in shadow wearing her modest two-piece costume, while Nia played with the Brean girls, having been issued with a blanket caution against naughtiness. Closing her eyes, Ailsa tried to ignore a discussion of the alleged smell of Egypt, which the seasoned veterans told the new girls would hit them well before the Empire Glory so much as spied land at Port Said. The shittiest pong in the world, they said, and Ailsa felt Irene flinch.
Lying back, she gave her mind – and, in her daydream, her body – to Joe. She imagined herself stepping out of her clothes just as Mona did, chatting all the while. Night and day, you are the one. The dark triangle of pubic hair against the paleness of Mona’s generous body had shocked her. From Mona’s soaking hair, little rivers had crept down her forehead and down the ripples of her spine. Her moistness had been absorbed into Ailsa’s cotton blouse, dancing her round the cabin, and when they’d moved apart, she’d carried the trace of Mona. Ailsa had drawn a sharp breath.
Nightly sensual dreams made her blush on waking. Was it Mona or was it Ben who aroused her? Or both? Against her will, Ailsa was kindled by the sensual heat that sprang between husband and wife; the experience they seemed to have of mysteries so far all but closed to the virginal Ailsa. Mona had said something about an open marriage. That if you loved someone, you wanted the fullest possible happiness for them. Didn’t you? Possessiveness was bourgeois: look at Sartre and de Beauvoir. Ailsa distrusted those two libertine Gallic philosophers. She shrank from such arrangements as likely to benefit the man rather than the woman, unless she was missing something important – which was always possible. Someone would be hurt, it stood to reason. Mona, feeling her draw back, had said no more on the subject. It wasn’t just prudishness on Ailsa’s part, no, she didn’t think so.
Turning away in momentary aversion, she’d seen the Jacobs as carriers of the germs of chaos. They were busily culturing it on a tray. She didn’t want to be infected.
And yet they were a picture of married tenderness. It was perhaps with herself that Ailsa quarrelled. Perpetually on tiptoe, she peered excitedly over a high wall. Always with her husband there had been a shy and numb uncertainty, kind and sensitive as he was.
She’d believed that was how sex was, nicer for men than for women, except for the sweet and heart-fluttering moments that led up to the act itself. Always too short. A promise, not exactly broken, but never fulfilled.
It came back to Ailsa now: the night at Brewers’ Green when she’d awoken to an animal sound behind the partition, a throaty rasping, a Go on, go on, don’t stop! A woman’s voice that wound up and up like pain. Like birth.
She drifted off.
Half an hour later she was awoken by the sound of, was it, gunfire? Where was Nia? Ailsa sat up, distraught. There were no children at all on deck. Just the women basking, who reassured her that the kiddies had gone below for a game of hide-and-seek. Supervised, of course. The infantry on the mess deck were having some sort of drill. Firing blanks, Irene said, don’t worry!
‘Did you see Nia go down?’
‘Oh yes. She was with my boys. She crouched down and kissed you before she went. Rather sweet actually. I always wanted a girl.’
No land for miles around. The sapphire sea, so tranquil and tranquillising. The engine beating up gently through the boards as the ship made for Malta.
*
Nia straddled her way over the red cord dividing off the men’s deck. A parade was going on towards the back of the ship: if she were seen, she’d be scooped up and returned to her mother. The lifeboats were a perfect place for a sunny nest. She cwtched down between the boats and the rails, drawing from her pocket a package of cake and several wine gums, wrapped in a paper napkin. She fed the dry cake to her golliwog and, humming to herself, put a wine gum in her mouth. Enjoying the sensation of the humming against her palate and the back of her nose, she stood up and looked through the railing.
Porpoises.
The creatures were magical. In their speed and shiningness, ri
sing and falling, the porpoises followed and sometimes led the way. She watched them dart through the green water to overtake the ship.
The soldiers at the front were stamping on caps for a laugh: that was her first thought. Wriggling through the gap between the lifeboat and the bulwark, Nia peered out at the rumps of khaki men in shorts. They were killing themselves laughing, as they shot rifles at, she supposed, invisible soldiers on other boats in the sea.
‘Got you!’ they shouted. ‘Get that one there!’
Perhaps there was a war – but why were the soldiers laughing? Were they playing Cowboys and Indians?
And now a fight had broken out amongst themselves. Nia rose slowly to her feet, sticking her thumb in her mouth through the cot sheet, staring in silence.
One soldier launched himself at another, roaring, wrenching him round by the arm. The grabbed soldier, a tall, lanky man, spun on the spot and his rifle slewed right round. He was shouting; the short man pulled at him; he lost his footing.
The gun was pointing straight at Nia.
It went off. Once, twice. The first shot went far wide. At the second crack, Nia fell.
‘A kiddie! There’s a kiddie!’
*
The women crowded to the rails, craning to look at the water.
Oh no!
What are they doing?
Target practice. Disgusting. Someone should tell them.
Ailsa rushed to the rail. The water was boiling with blood; they were ploughing through blood. What was it? Oh no, not the porpoises. The gun-happy infantry were using them for target practice. Ordered to do so, someone said. Uproar. Barbarians! Oh God, porpoises are only fish, get a grip! Don’t you eat fish and chips then? Hedwig protested in a high, hectic voice that actually she did not eat fish and chips, neither were porpoises fishes, as it happened, but warm-blooded mammals like ourselves, if anyone was interested; she was a vegetarian. And someone piped up in a loud whisper: Oh yes, we know, so was dear old Adolf.
Ailsa watched a wounded creature arch above the racing water. Dark blood poured from a gash like oil from a pipe. Its raised fin vanished. The Empire Glory powered on. There was shouting; the shooting stopped and the women turned from the rails. How could it be that we made a slaughterhouse even of the sea?
Now there was a diversion. A sister troopship, homeward bound. The women read the name: the Empire Windrush. They gathered at the side again, waving and calling.
A soldier came running: ‘Which of you is Mrs Roberts?’
An accident, the young Lieutenant told Ailsa. He looked about nineteen. Unfortunately, he went on, the little girl had been caught in the middle of it. But no, no, she was not injured, don’t be alarmed. Somehow or other she’d found her way on to the troop deck and hidden under a lifeboat. The men had been drilling, doing target practice. A conscript had seen red, one of these Cruelty to Animals people, and tried to stop them shooting the porpoises. He’d caused a shot to fly wide, in the direction of the little girl – which luckily had ricocheted harmlessly off a bulkhead. The idiot who’d caused the accident was a trainee teacher in civilian life, destined for a desk job in the medical corps at Fayid. He’d got forty-eight hours in solitary.
Restored to her mother, Nia sat in the crook of Ailsa’s arm, sucking her thumb, Golly in her lap and her cheek against the cosy pad of her sheet. She said nothing. Again I took my eye off her, and again she nearly got herself killed, Ailsa thought, with somersaulting heart. Her own gallivantings (for that’s what people would call them, gallivantings) on the Empire Glory came into question. Who had taught Nia to jump over the red rope? Her face burned. It had got to stop. What on earth had possessed her? Ailsa rested her hand on Nia’s head, and kept it there. Nia felt up and fondled the big hand with her small one. She wore Ailsa’s hand like a cap. It secured her. It held her down to the ground and kept her mind inside her head. Nobody told her off.
‘Why were they shooting the creatures, may one ask?’ Hedwig wanted to know.
The Lieutenant was courteous but his face said it all: Bird-brained Kraut. He explained. The troops must be kept at the peak of training: if the enemy attacked, we must be ready to defend our women and children at a moment’s notice. The men had left Britain crack shots and crack shots they must remain.
‘Well, I am disgusted.’ Hedwig’s face was brick-red. ‘The creatures are innocent and friendly. What have have they done to us, I would ask, to be used for target practice? I for one cannot stand by and witness this Barbarei, diese Brutalität.’
And a tremendous row erupted, with the German woman attacked on all sides for her resistance.
‘If the kiddies are kept under control …’ the Lieutenant courteously suggested to Ailsa, and didn’t go on.
He meant well. Most folk did, when you came down to it, and yet somehow or other the sum of our actions could be arrogance and cruelty. The women savaged Hedwig, who was near to tears but held her own in deteriorating English. Like the scapehen in an overcrowded, squawking roost, Ailsa thought, the gang viciously gathering round to peck the runt to death. Out of the corner of her eye, soothing Nia, she was aware of the German woman faltering away, into a space of deeper isolation. In the war it had all been black and white. Now there was fog everywhere. The woman was outspoken and brave. Qualities that did not endear themselves to the nice, prevaricating English. Nazi, they thought automatically whenever they clapped eyes on Hedwig. She might as well have gone around with a label round her neck. And look at me, I’m just standing by.
Ailsa sat with her quiet daughter in her lap. She’d lose all these travelling companions once they docked at Port Said. Her mind seethed. Who was the enemy we were supposed to engage? The Soviets? Looking out to sea, she imagined a Communist warship bearing down on the Empire Glory. After Prague and the Berlin blockade last year, when they’d all thought, War can come again, worse this time, we are weak, it will wipe us out, such a warship – a whole fleet of them – was easy to imagine.
From East Germany, the Red Army could march to the western seaboard just like that. What was to stop them? They only needed to pull on their boots and they’d be at Dunkirk, four million men. They needn’t even bother to march: one bomb could do for us, now that the Soviet Union was about to become an atomic power. War is normal for our generation, Ailsa thought. It will come back and we’ll not be surprised.
It will. There will be war, this year, next year.
She felt no dread: weariness rather. The nearer the Empire Glory sailed to Egypt, the nearer it came to Molotov and Stalin. The Soviet backside in the south where their oil and minerals were. The oilfields of Iran and Iraq. And that’s what we were doing at Suez, she thought, threatening the Russians’ backside to prevent them overrunning civilisation.
And that was why the porpoises had to die! Us and our pop-guns! No sense to it at all. If you asked a Russian woman what she wanted, she would say, as Ailsa did, a better life for our children, security. But the Russian woman was not asked, any more than the Egyptian woman was asked, or she, Ailsa Roberts, was asked, though she ranked as a voter and a citizen.
Ailsa’s eyes drifted to a capstan upon which an insect had alighted. A greenfly? Scooped up on a breeze, perhaps, from Italy or Greece.
Beguiled, Nia reached out and caught the creature on her fingertip; held it close to her eyes and announced that it was her pet. She did not smile. What knowledge now rode behind Nia’s eyes? Blood boiling in water, porpoises turned to meat. On purpose. And when the conscript went yelling up to the soldier and grabbed his gun … what did she see and fear? Nia would forget but the knowledge would still be there. The greenfly blew away. Ailsa searched in the glazed green eyes for a comfort the subdued child could not extend. She kissed Nia’s forehead and freckled nose and cheeks repeatedly and begged her never to run off again and leave Mami. Nia hummed. She wouldn’t go near the railings or look out over the sea with its treacheries. Malta was coming into view but Nia would not so much as glance at it. Malta for all Nia knew might be bad. Or,
if it were a good and beautiful island, Malta might be butchered in front of her eyes.
Ailsa would have to withdraw from Mona, delicately, gently detach. No option. She herself had taught her daughter contempt for boundaries and Nia had suffered for it.
Happily the child was safely down in their cabin taking a nap when the ship put in at Malta and sacks of rotten potatoes were distributed to the cheering troops, together with orders to pelt the wogs in bum boats selling their wares, to keep them away from the hull of the Empire Glory. For their own safety’s sake, as Babs observed to Ailsa.
5
A day out from Port Said, the blazing heat intensified. The time of farewells was nearly upon the women of the Empire Glory. A row of prams stood in the shade of an awning, empty of babies, who were being fed below. Babes of the Empire: tomorrow’s soldiers and mothers. Mrs Grey said, Mark my words, the jolly old stork will be paying a visit to your Married Quarters, ladies, nine months from tomorrow night! Oh you may giggle and shake your heads but we can look forward to the patter of little feet in – let’s see – and she’d counted on her fingers, with a chuckle – end of March!
And soon Ailsa would be in Joe’s arms. She felt as shy as a bride at the prospect.
She made her way down to the library: it was goodbye to Mona and that was for the best. Costly leather-bound books with gilt titles on their spines rose to the ceiling, inherited from the German Navy. A volume of Goethe’s Early Poems lay on the table, open at ‘An den Mond’. She’d studied a selection at school and knew some pretty well by heart. Ailsa’s eyes negotiated its thorny Gothic script. The young Goethe lingering by the moonlit river knew that jests and kisses were things of the past. Some unstated act of betrayal had taken place that had changed everything forever.
Into Suez Page 6