The Girl from Simon's Bay

by Barbara Mutch

  ‘I’m guessing this is the man who wrote to you?’

  I struggled to banish the image of David wounded, his blue eyes losing focus, the sea closing over him until all that was left was the memory.

  ‘It wasn’t planned, Ma. And I’m not ashamed. He loves me, too.’

  ‘Ah, child, they all do.’ She gave a weary smile. ‘You’re beautiful. Of course they love you! But it’s only while they’re sick.’

  I looked down at my hands. David and I were long past patient–nurse gratitude. And, if Ma was looking for reasons why it wouldn’t work, the differences of colour and background were less important. It was the fact of his marriage that would keep us apart.

  Ma waited for me to respond.

  She sighed.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Lou,’ she kissed the top of my head. ‘I’m sure he’s a good man. But it would never have gone anywhere. Not with a white officer. Try to get some rest. I’ll bring you supper a little later.’

  She gathered the cups, then stopped at the door.

  ‘When the war’s over, you’re sure to find someone who’ll make a fine husband.’

  I sat in the gathering darkness.

  The last time I was at Seaforth beach, I’d found another Pink Lady, a twin of the one I’d given him. I reached over to my shell collection and picked it up, fingered its spine, held it to my ear.

  It wouldn’t help to let my distress show. Pa said the news wasn’t official.

  I must hold on until the formal announcement.

  And even then, I mustn’t give way. There was still too much to lose.

  For three days, there was no word. Then it came. The Admiralty announced with regret … HMS Dorsetshire and HMS Cornwall sunk by enemy action in the Indian Ocean … no information yet on survivors.

  Ma came into my bedroom that evening and wordlessly brushed my hair.

  I didn’t tell her that David and I were lovers. There was no point. If he was gone, there was no need for anyone but myself to know. The candlelit bedroom of a cottage beneath Table Mountain would be mine alone, to cherish for ever.

  Pa asked no questions, but he walked me to hospital each morning, and walked me home at the end of my shift. I don’t know how he rearranged his work to do so, but whenever I came off duty, he was there, sitting on a rock below the entrance.

  ‘Thank you, Pa.’

  I sat down beside him and leant my head on his shoulder.

  He patted me and hauled himself up.

  ‘Let’s get back. Your ma’s making apple pie.’

  Pa eventually found out that there were survivors but the navy hadn’t released names.

  ‘HMS Enterprise and her destroyers picked them up.’

  ‘Where are they, Pa?’

  He wrinkled his forehead. ‘Addu Atoll in the Maldives, probably. The wounded will go to Ceylon or India. I’m sorry, Lou, that’s all I could find out.’

  I looked out of our front door. The season was on the turn. Soon the mists would roll in from the sea and blanket the docks, and the foghorn would sound during the day.

  ‘When will I know?’

  He put his arm around my shoulders, shook his head.

  ‘Dorsetshire was being refitted in Colombo,’ he murmured. ‘Better radar, more anti-aircraft guns. But then the Jap fleet came through the Malacca Straits, heading for Ceylon. She had to leave before the work was done. I’m sorry, Lou. He was a good man.’

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  When there was no word from David, I told myself that he might be injured and unable to write. Perhaps there weren’t enough nurses where he was, to allow one of them to write on his behalf. Or maybe his letters were lost in transit, sunk by enemy shipping.

  But as the weeks went by it became harder to convince myself he was alive.

  I went to Seaforth. I stared at the sea I loved and tried not to hold it responsible.

  Against her natural instincts, Ma kept my secret liaison strictly to herself and Pa. None of us needed a scandal. And if she and Pa wondered about the extent of my friendship with David, they never asked.

  Vera visited. She was the only outsider I told. But, as with Ma, only part of the truth.

  ‘He’s dead, V.’ I picked up the Pink Lady and smoothed it. ‘His ship was sunk off Ceylon.’

  She sat down beside me on the bed and leant her shoulder against mine. ‘I’m so sorry, Lou.’ She waited a while, then nudged me. ‘Maybe it’s for the best? You could never have married him.’

  ‘No, I could never have married him.’

  Two months of silence passed. I performed my duties in theatre, I nursed my patients on the ward and I smiled at their jokes. I swept floors, gave medicines, helped VADs change dressings, even shooed the baboons from the slopes behind the ward. ‘Dreadful beasts!’ shuddered Sister.

  I became a good actor – no one noticed my lack of delight in my work.

  It was a form of lying, I suppose. But lying, in this case, to myself.

  Winter blew in and our convalescing patients were forced to retreat from the verandah. The flags on the ships streamed permanently from the north. I began to notice that I was thinking of David in the past tense.

  In the dockyard, Pa cocked an ear to every passing officer’s conversation and it turned out that the surviving Dorsetshire and Cornwall crews had indeed been split up between the Maldives and India or were already returning to the UK. But unless you knew someone who knew someone, there was no way to find out whether David was alive.

  ‘It’s tricky to get names, Lou,’ Pa said quietly. ‘That’s only for next of kin.’

  ‘Don’t do anything to get in trouble, Pa.’

  By contrast, Ma believed that even if David had survived against the odds, the romance was surely doomed. There could be no future for a brown girl and a white officer. It was now a matter of kindly distraction and diversion. She took me to Bible study classes in order to rekindle my sense of right and wrong. She made comforting soups. She invited friends to the cottage for tea. She treated me as if I was a child who’d strayed, and needed fattening.

  ‘Your ma’s right,’ said Vera, munching one of Ma’s scones. ‘You need building up.’

  In my life, I’ve only allowed myself to cry with joy – or the anticipation of it. Except for when the mountain slipped and I thought Ma was dead and I couldn’t stop weeping as the rain poured down and the stream at the Hewsons’ tried to wash me away.

  But now I cried at night over anticipated loss.

  Ma looked at my face in the morning and wondered why it was taking me so long to get over a man I knew only superficially and who was never destined to be with me anyway.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  My darling Louise,

  I hope this letter finds you soon, I know the post out of India is unreliable so I’ve been writing every week. I hate to imagine what you’ve been going through, knowing that my ship had gone down. I hope, somehow, you may have got word through your father that I was lucky enough to survive. I’ve written to Elizabeth, of course, and I’m sure my uncle at the Admiralty will have told her.

  Two hundred of our crew died in the attack, and many were injured. I am beyond sadness for them and their families. I don’t know why I was spared while so many were not. Our rescue, after a day and a half, came just in time. Our water was almost out and we had to take turns in the sea because only two whalers survived.

  One of the outcomes is that our close-knit group is now being broken up and sent to other ships. I will miss them. It looks like I’ll be reassigned shortly, too. War allows for no respite.

  But you were with me, my beloved L, through all those hours in the water. I saw you walking towards me in your blue dress, carrying your suitcase. I felt your touch, I relived our time together. How we talked, how we loved!

  What I said at the station in Cape Town holds true now more than ever.

  Please wait for me. I will come back.

  All my love,

  David

  Chapter Thirty-Se
ven

  Piet leant back against the empty crates and began to laugh.

  The conductor was down the train, probably having a smoke with the engine driver, or laughing with the passengers about the travelling Great Dane called Just Nuisance, with his navy pass and his doting audience of able seamen.

  Once again, it had gone perfectly.

  The Simon’s Town guard, growing fat on a weekly gift of fish, hadn’t even bothered to check the number of crates. At the Cape Town end, the paperwork was quickly signed by a second guard who also regularly benefitted from Piet’s generosity.

  Piet spotted his contact on the station concourse. In the confusion of trolleys and scurrying passengers, and while wheeling his particular trolley towards the navy’s truck, it was child’s play to lift the tarpaulin, hand one crate over and trouser the payment.

  He felt into his pocket for the reassuring crinkle of a note.

  A week’s wages for one day’s work. And then, on Friday, his regular navy pay.

  If the war went on long enough, he’d be a wealthy man.

  And then – who’s to say Louise wouldn’t come running back?

  He didn’t intend to save himself for that – there were several girls already pleasuring him for the chance to become Mrs Philander – but it was worth bearing in mind.

  The train shunted and then began to gather itself for the final run from Fish Hoek into Simon’s Town.

  He didn’t want to think of Lou, but he couldn’t help casting his mind back.

  It had been an accidental sighting. And for months Piet said nothing even while he once again harboured thoughts of following the man when his ship next visited Simon’s Town, contriving an accidental stumble-and-punch in a dark alley by the Officers’ Club.

  It came about because the Dorsetshire chose, for once, to moor in Cape Town.

  He’d been taking a short cut through the Company Gardens after visiting the restaurant that was keen on his fish.

  They were walking side by side, the man was the same one she’d met in Simon’s Town on the mountain. The same one she’d laughed with. He was carrying a suitcase.

  Piet hid behind a bush as they passed, then followed them to a fancy cottage up the mountain. He watched them go through the gate. This was no casual visit, he could tell. That was Louise’s case the man was carrying. She was staying with him.

  He turned away and went to spend the night with a girl he knew in District Six.

  And now the man was probably dead, if the rumours about the losses on Dorsetshire were true. So there was nothing to be done, no anonymous revenge to be taken. He felt sorry for Lou, but she’d taken a step too far. She probably got what she deserved.

  Even so, for the moment, he’d keep quiet.

  Knowledge was different from fish, it wasn’t perishable.

  The longer you held onto it, the more valuable it became.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  ‘Staff Nurse Ahrendts?’ Sister called from her table one midday. ‘We have an urgent admission from the Duchess of York, just docked. A captain with sepsis of the leg and damaged lungs. A hero, VC in the Great War. We’ll put him in number eight.’

  ‘Yes, Sister. I’ll make sure everything is ready.’

  Sister nodded and bent to her ward notes.

  When he arrived, Sister, mindful of the VC, went to meet the ambulance personally. The other patients craned as the stretcher was brought in. The captain was coughing heavily. I waited by the empty bed with a dressing tray nearby. And, following the stretcher, came a tall, fair-haired man in uniform with the rank of a lieutenant commander.

  I clutched the railing of the bed.

  Sister bustled alongside. The orderlies lifted the injured man from the stretcher onto the bed.

  ‘Staff Nurse! What are you waiting for? Draw the curtains!’

  He had stopped halfway down the ward. And – I caught my breath – he showed no sign of injury.

  I felt his eyes rest on me like a caress.

  ‘Nurse!’

  I drew the curtains.

  Sister glared at me, then addressed the ill man. ‘The surgeon commander will be here soon, Captain. In the meantime, Staff Nurse will attend to your wound.’

  She swept aside the curtain and marched off. I heard her steps slow.

  ‘Why, Lieutenant Commander Horrocks. I trust you don’t need our attention at this time?’

  ‘No thank you, Sister. I’ve been accompanying Captain Agar.’

  ‘I can assure you that the captain is now in safe hands. You must have other duties, I’m sure. Good afternoon.’

  I placed the dressing tray on the side table with a shaky clatter.

  Captain Agar cleared his throat.

  ‘Do you know, Nurse, my lieutenant commander out there was once a patient here?’

  I flashed him a quick glance. ‘Yes, he was. How did you get this wound, sir?’

  ‘I was hit by a bomb fragment,’ he grimaced. ‘Then my leg got infected in India. Not surprising, in that heat.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, sir. Please hold still.’

  I don’t remember how I got through the rest of my duty.

  The air in the ward shimmered with a radiance that’s only blessed me a few times in my life. Luckily, Sister appeared not to notice and made no reference to my tardiness with the bed curtains other than to give me a questioning look after I finished with the captain.

  A drizzle began to shroud the bay and obscure the mountain path where David and I had walked. Where else would we be able to meet within the goldfish bowl that was Simon’s Town? And why was I contemplating such a dangerous possibility …

  At the end of my shift I fastened my cloak and left by the lower entrance. I would go down to St George’s Street and walk along the tarmac road rather than risk the slippery mountain path, and pray that he would be discreet enough not to meet me in town, because I wouldn’t be able to hold back from running to him.

  ‘Lou?’ Pa stepped out of the guardhouse where he’d been sheltering.

  ‘Pa!’ I gasped. ‘He’s alive, Pa!’ I flung myself in his arms.

  ‘Come, child,’ he muttered, disengaging himself and giving an embarrassed grin to the guard who was watching us. ‘Let’s get home. Lord knows what we’re going to do, but standing here and getting wet isn’t going to help.’

  It was only when we got home that I realised what Pa meant.

  For, sitting on a chair in the lounge was David, his beribboned uniform resplendent against our shabby upholstery. Ma perched nervously nearby. I stopped in the doorway, my cloak dripping, my white shoes rimed with mud from the leap across the stream at the Hewsons’.

  Ma pursed her lips and looked at me with a tension that I recognised from my teenage years: pride, in this case that I could have attracted such a fine man, but fear, as ever, of where my ambition might lead.

  No one spoke. Pa shook out his raincoat.

  David leapt up and gathered me gently, wet cloak and all, into his arms.

  There was no time to protest or wonder at his recklessness, because I heard the front door close and a key turn in the lock and then we were alone and he was kissing me with passion.

  ‘Wait!’ I pulled away. ‘You’re not wounded? I’ve been desperate—’ I ran my hands over his arms and chest, down his back. He was thin but reassuringly whole, and his face bore the remains of severe sunburn. His eyes were clear, thank God, undamaged by splinters or fire. Whatever retribution was due to come my way, it hadn’t chosen David as its victim.

  ‘I’m well!’ He chuckled at my impromptu check-up. ‘I wrote every week while we were in India.’

  ‘I never received a word!’

  He drew me down beside him on the sofa.

  ‘Listen, my darling. We haven’t much time. It took a while but I’ve persuaded your mother,’ he grinned, ‘to give us two hours together.’

  It wasn’t long enough.

  He carried me through to my bedroom and we made love on the narrow bed, alongside the b
ookshelf with my seashells and his hidden letters. And afterwards he told me about the Dorsetshire, his stark words piercing the bray of the foghorn and the patter of rain and the tender aftermath of love.

  The thirst, the deaths, the brutal silence of water and sky.

  ‘But the sea didn’t take you,’ I touched his scar, ‘it kept you alive.’

  ‘And so did you,’ he said. ‘Without you, I would’ve died.’

  Then we dressed, and remade the bed.

  There wasn’t much time left.

  He stood behind me as I brushed my hair. I looked at him in the mirror.

  ‘What are we going to do? How are we going to get you out of here?’

  He rested a calming hand on the top of my head. ‘No one saw me arrive, darling – they were all indoors because of the rain. And I’ll leave under the blackout.’

  But he didn’t know how close the Terrace was, how the curtains at every front window twitched whatever the weather and blackout. Especially over me. I’d have to contrive a story, tell a lie …

  We went back to the sitting room. I lit candles, made tea, and wondered why being with him like this in my own home, in my own bed, felt proper rather than forbidden; meant-to-be rather than outrageous.

  The rain stopped, but the wind began to pick up. He turned his head to listen to the flailing palms.

  ‘We have oaks around Corbey,’ he mused. ‘The wind is different, less energetic. I want to take you there.’

  I poured him more tea. There was so much – and yet so little – that needed to be said.

  ‘When must you leave?’

  He put a finger to my lips. ‘Soon, I’m afraid.’

  My cup shook slightly in my hands. He took it from me and placed it back on the tray.

  ‘A love like ours must be fought for, my darling.’ His hands, hard from the business of guns and survival, gentled mine. ‘I will be asking Elizabeth for a divorce at the end of the war.’