Only once did I hear from my parents during this time. Father sent a telegram. He must have realised our performances were a success and that we were not after all coming back to London. The telegram bore just three words: All is forgiven. And I was angry because it was Father who should have been asking for forgiveness. I had done nothing wrong but take the money that was already mine. I heard he had left the Aq and was back at the Lambeth Baths, but without his daughter or eldest son the crowds were far smaller than they once had been and I was pleased about that.
‘You wouldn’t go back to him, would you?’ asked Dob.
‘Of course not,’ I replied, although sometimes at night I did dream of such a thing, that we were back to how we once had been, swimming together again. But I was stubborn and so was Father, and Dob said, ‘Good, because he doesn’t have your best interests at heart.’
*
We had a quiet wedding at Auntie Jessie’s house. Billy gave me away and I thought of Mother and how she used to say, ‘What man will want you?’ But she was wrong, a man had wanted me, and he had wanted me as a swimmer. I would have liked Mother to have been at the wedding, but she would not have come without Father and this was my day. I didn’t want him there to cause a scene. Auntie Jessie was sad about this and begged me to tell my parents, but Dob supported me; we would keep this marriage to ourselves.
He gave me a plain gold ring with our initials and the date engraved inside, along with the time we had met, a quarter past two. Once his friends had congratulated the groom and we had cut the cake, I couldn’t wait to change into my travelling clothes and be gone. Dob had arranged the tour; he would be my manager now, and he’d advised me to use my maiden name. ‘That is what people know you by,’ he said. ‘Let them still call you Miss Daisy Belle.’ Billy was happy to take a back seat from making arrangements; he was concentrating on his new family now.
Auntie Jessie was there to bid us goodbye when we left for Liverpool. She helped us load our luggage onto the train and then she slipped a small flask of brandy into a pocket of my holdall, saying, ‘You never know when you might need it if you get seasick.’ I laughed and told her I was a swimmer, I would never get seasick.
Little Percy was excited, although he wasn’t quite old enough to appreciate the adventure. But he was beginning to speak now and he knew three words, ‘mama’, ‘papa’, and ‘America!’ He couldn’t wait to start exploring the ship; he was a child full of questions just as I had been, inspecting the wash basin and the round windows, turning the electric light on and off, struggling to get up into his mother’s bed.
Dob had taken two second-class cabins but if things went well, he said, we would be coming back in a first-class stateroom. The ship was magnificent, with funnels and sails and fluttering flags, and as we stood on the deck to bid England farewell Dob played his mouth organ and I linked my arm in his, eager to start our new life.
But while we were told it would take ten days to reach America, it felt like a hundred to me. Everyone else was able to get up and walk the deck, to play cards and leapfrog, to have their meals and enjoy themselves, but from the moment we set sail I was confined to bed miserable with nausea. I couldn’t understand why Dob, who feared the water, fared so well. Perhaps it was because I was happy within the sea but not riding on top of it; if only they could throw me overboard, I thought, I would swim to New York instead.
My husband was very patient during my sickness; he didn’t press me for anything. And I felt sorry for him, because this was not the way our honeymoon should have been.
A kind stewardess said I would be fine by Monday, but Monday came and went and there I was, still sick on my berth. ‘What can I fetch you?’ she asked and I could think of just one thing – if only she could fetch me land. I lay there holding myself while the ship pitched and rolled, the sea outside the porthole bespattered with foam, the waves sending thundering blows to the sides of the ship. By day I listened to people hurrying to and fro, shouting and singing snatches of songs, heard the clash and clang of dishes, the urgent orders for food. Then at night while Dob slept I listened to the sounds of scrubbing and the occasional foghorn that drowned out everything else.
After a week, the ship’s doctor paid a visit and urged me to come up on deck or I’d be in no fit state to do anything else. I struggled into my clothes and Dob helped me along the passage up to the promenade. Oh, the fresh air and the sight of the sea! I didn’t know why I had stayed in my cabin so long, as I sat on the deck with a rug wrapped around me and the great ocean all my own, watching the last hour of light over the Atlantic. A steward bought me a hot drink and asked if I were a stowaway, for no one had seen me on the voyage at all. No, I told him, I’m Daisy Belle and I’m going to America to swim. I was quite proud of myself, certain from everything Dob had said that a warm welcome was waiting, and I was happy to leave the seaside shows behind.
The next day I woke feeling refreshed and I was up on deck along with everyone else as we started to enter the harbour and steam towards the island of New York. I took my husband’s arm; our married life had not started as it should and now in America it would.
‘Where is Sandy Hook?’ Dob asked a steward.
‘Why, you’ve missed it sir.’ The steward gestured behind us. ‘It’s that hook of land at the tip of New Jersey.’
‘What is Sandy Hook?’ I asked.
‘It’s where you’ll be swimming from,’ said Dob.
‘It is?’
Dob laughed, ‘Yes, from Sandy Hook to Rockaway in New York.’
I smiled and put my face to the breeze, surveying a waterway as vast and busy as the Thames. We passed a tall lighthouse and then ahead of us was a line of sandbanks and church steeples rising into the sky. I glanced at my brother standing next to me; he was wearing his best suit and looked healthy and ruddy from our voyage. ‘Here we are,’ said Billy, putting his arm round my shoulder, ‘this is it, little tadpole: America.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
When we stepped off the boat a dozen reporters were waiting on the wharf, surrounded by passengers rushing to collect their belongings and hurrying to be reunited with loved ones. ‘Aha,’ said a man at the centre of the group, ‘the celebrated swimmers from England! Mr Richard Fitzgerald, pleased to make your acquaintance.’ He wore alligator shoes and a waistcoat that dazzled the eye, and in his mouth was the largest cigar I had ever seen. ‘You must call me Dickie,’ he said, pausing to spit on the ground, as all American men seemed to do. Then he held out his hand, saying he would take us in charge and escort us to our hotel. But first we needed to answer the reporters.
‘Miss Belle!’ called a short man, a camera clutched against his chest. ‘What do you think of this country?’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I have only just arrived, but I think everything looks… so bright and cheerful.’
The reporter laughed. ‘How funny do you talk!’
And I thought, it is not me who talks funny, it is you. I couldn’t believe I had come all this way to hear people speaking this strange sort of English.
‘Miss Belle!’ cried another reporter. ‘Can you really remain in the water an entire day?’
I was about to reply when Dob answered for me, ‘She can remain in the water three whole days, as she did at the Royal Aquarium. And mind you include the nights as well!’
‘Without being tired?’ asked the reporter.
‘Certainly,’ said Dob, ‘if someone watches and keeps her awake when she feels drowsy.’
He smiled at me and I smiled back, though I felt a little confused. Dob had never seen me at the Aq, we hadn’t known each other then; and it wasn’t true, no one had had to keep me awake.
‘I could stay in the water floating and swimming on my back for a week,’ I told the reporter, ‘if I wanted to.’
He chuckled and scribbled in his notebook. ‘Don’t you get cold?’
‘No,’ I told him, ‘I never feel cold in the water.’
‘But where do you get the muscle from
?’ He raised his eyebrows and looked me up and down. ‘A pretty young girl like you?’
I pushed up a sleeve and flexed my right arm. ‘Do you see,’ I asked, ‘what a muscle I’ve got?’
‘That’s enough,’ said Dob, moving to stand in front of me.
But Dickie Fitzgerald was delighted with my gesture and so were the journalists, who began to shout out more questions.
‘What do you think about swimming from Sandy Hook?’ asked one, ‘when you don’t know the currents and there’s only a one in a million chance you’ll make it?’
I tried not to show my surprise, that he’d known about my intended swim before I did. So I kept my face calm and looked him in the eye. ‘I can do it. If I set my mind to it.’
‘Can he swim?’ asked the reporter, pointing at little Percy who was struggling to get down from Violet’s arms.
‘Why of course he can,’ replied Billy, taking his son and lifting him up in the air. ‘He can swim nearly as well as I could at that age.’
‘So the science runs in the family?’
Billy smiled. ‘The fondness for water is hereditary.’
I caught my breath then, for he sounded so like our father and we were in America now, I didn’t want to think about him.
‘Mr Belle!’ cried one of the reporters, turning his attention to my brother and firing off a barrage of questions. What was his weight, his height, his fastest time? Which stroke did he prefer, who did he intend to beat in America?
‘Gentlemen,’ said Dob at last, ‘I think we’ll have to leave the rest of this enjoyable chat for later.’
‘One more question for Miss Belle!’ shouted the man with the camera.
Dob put up his hand to cut him off. ‘She is tired.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said.
‘I’m sure you don’t,’ said Dob, lowering his voice. ‘But perhaps you could be more ladylike.’
He spoke so gently that it took me a moment to realise what he’d said. I felt my face flush as the words sank in, hoping the journalists hadn’t heard. What did he mean? I was as ladylike as I knew how.
‘One final question for Miss Belle!’ implored a reporter standing at the back.
I smiled and waited; whatever Dob said I would be polite and reply. He would ask me about my diet and training regime, he would want to verify the length I’d swum in the Thames, or the height of my dive at the Aq. ‘Yes?’ I asked.
‘Your hair, Miss Belle. However do you curl it like that?’
Then out we were on the streets on the way to our hotel and I forgot about the reporters, eager to take everything in: the shop windows, the people in the park, the traffic on Broadway. But New York had a dry choking heat that was like being smothered in blankets and soon I was desperate to reach our hotel. Lunch was laid out for us, cakes and buns, huge pears and oranges, jugs of creamy milk and plates of fried ham. How the Americans loved their ham, they seemed to have it morning, noon and night, and Percy was overjoyed with the feast.
‘Mr Fitzgerald’s very friendly,’ said my brother, peeling an orange. ‘I like him.’
‘So does your sister,’ said Dob.
I saw the way that Billy looked at my husband and I glanced away, not wanting to see the dislike in his eyes. I’d exchanged barely two words with Dickie Fitzgerald. I had demonstrated neither like nor dislike, I had simply been civil. Then Dob laughed and passed me a slice of cake and I decided that my husband meant nothing by his words. Billy had been wrong to take offence on my behalf. And perhaps I had been over-familiar with Dickie Fitzgerald. I didn’t know the ways of Americans; I should not have pushed up my sleeve. Dob was looking out for me and that was only natural.
*
That night we shared a bed for the first time. In Liverpool we had stayed in one room with Billy and his family, while on the ship I had been ill. But now we were alone. Dob had been a gentleman since the day we’d first met, he had done nothing that my mother would have frowned upon and that was why I had trusted him. I was excited now as I undressed and got into bed, full of anticipation of the night to come. But then Dob turned off the lights, saying it was better that way, and I was surprised; did he not want to see me? I felt the bed sag under his weight, and I waited for him to join me, to hear the sweet words he had spoken in Margate. I felt the roughness of his whiskers, the heat of his body on mine. And yet all the time he moved above me he spoke not a single word. Then it was over and the only sound inside the darkened room was the tick-tick of a clock.
I lay there for a long time afterwards, staring at the ceiling while Dob fell asleep. I listened to the noises of New York, horses’ hooves fading as they passed along the street outside and the sudden piercing sound of a clarinet. It seemed to me that I was as far away from my husband as a woman could possibly be, and that there had been no love between us at all.
*
The following week Billy and I gave a small exhibition intended mainly for the press. It was in a sizeable pool in the east of the city, and there were quite a few ladies in the audience, with powder all over their faces, necks and arms, which Violet and I thought very strange. Dickie Fitzgerald introduced me as having come all the way from England, which drew great applause, and the people cheered even more when they saw me emerge in a sailor suit. It was Dob’s idea: I was to plunge into the water, unfasten my clothes at the bottom, and reappear on the surface wearing a simple shirt and black silk drawers. How my mother would hate this, I thought, as I bowed to acknowledge the cheers, to think I was undressing in the water for everyone to see! But that didn’t matter, I didn’t care. I was in America now and if this is what they loved then I would give it to them. And then I would swim.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
For the next few weeks we performed all over New York and each time the reception was even better than the last. At the city’s Natatorium we were introduced as champion swimmers of the world; by the time we arrived at a bathhouse on the Hudson River we were champion swimmers of the planet. The Americans were an exuberant audience and the applause was not scattered as it was in England, but long and almost continuous. They were thrilled to see Billy devouring sponge cakes and smoking a pipe, and Dickie Fitzgerald laughed and said, ‘Pshaw! If a man can eat, drink and smoke under water during this awful hot weather then why come to the surface and be roasted?’ But the Americans seemed to find my performance even more fascinating, as I propelled myself through a hoop, dived for pearls, and changed out of my sailor suit.
We visited a swimming school and sat in the gallery to watch a lady called Miss Bennett teaching girls to swim. Her pupils gathered by a flight of steps, all ages and sizes, dressed in brightly coloured costumes from rose pink to vivid scarlet, before running fearlessly into the water. Then I saw the most wonderful thing: a mother and daughter swimming together like a duck with her duckling. I glanced at Billy and he raised his eyebrows in reply; neither of us could ever imagine our mother doing such a thing. Miss Bennett reminded me a little of Father, the way she introduced her pupils, and when she told the crowd that young women were more likely to catch a husband by saving his life than by spending his dollars Dob laughed the loudest of all.
Finally came a girl who swam what they called ‘the prayer’, holding her clasped hands above her head. It was said to be a useful style for steamboat collisions, for the swimmer could pray for help while paddling forward. I didn’t think it would be much use myself, but again Billy and I exchanged looks; perhaps we would use this in our routine as well.
‘She seems very strong,’ I said, still watching the praying lady in the water, admiring the taut muscles of her arms.
‘She is,’ said Dob, ‘that’s Sarah Rosenheim. She has just challenged you to a swim at Atlantic City next week.’
Why hadn’t he mentioned this earlier? For the first time in my life I’d be swimming against a woman like me. I craned forward to get a better look; she certainly cut a fine figure as she got out of the pool and I could see she was a favourite with the crowd. But
could she race, was she fast and strong enough to beat me? There was a murmuring among the spectators then, I could sense a new excitement in the air as this time a man appeared at the top of the steps. He took his position at the far edge of the pool, and as he flexed his arms and rolled his shoulders, I felt the oddest flutter in my chest. Then a voice called for quiet. ‘Ladies and gentlemen! Put your hands together for Johnnie Heaven!’
I sat bolt upright in my seat. Had I really travelled across the ocean only to see the man I had once swum with at the Lambeth Baths? I watched as he dived into the water and set off across the pool. I saw the way he reached forward with his right hand as if to catch something and then drew himself up and over. His eyes were closed, just as they had been that morning at the baths when I’d slipped down into the water to join him. I remembered his broad back rising and falling and how I had sped up my stroke, about to overtake him when Mrs Peach had turned on a light. That had been the day I’d first wanted to see more of the world outside my father’s swimming kingdom, and now here I was in America.
‘Like the look of him, do you?’ asked Dob.
I didn’t answer; it was the man’s swimming I was admiring and why shouldn’t I?
‘Careful,’ said my husband and he put out one arm, resting it between the rail and my chest. ‘If you lean any further you’ll fall in.’
‘Did you ever see such an all-fired sight?’ exclaimed a voice from behind. ‘He’s certain to cross your English Channel this time.’
I turned around to see a gentleman chomping on a cigar. ‘Has he tried it before?’ I asked, for I had not heard Johnnie Heaven’s name since that morning at the baths.
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