The Ship of Brides

Beside him, on the floor, Frances had finished cleaning the cut on the bride’s face. The girl had stopped weeping and was in a state of white-faced shock, exacerbated, Nicol suspected, by the amount of alcohol she appeared to have drunk. Frances’s hair, wet with sweat, hung lank round her face; her pale cotton robe, now stuck to her skin, was smudged with oil and grease.

‘Pass me the mor**ine, please,’ she said. He got the little brown bottle out of her box. She took it, and then his hand, which she placed on a pad of gauze on the girl’s face. ‘Keep hold of that,’ she told him. ‘Tight as you can. Someone check Kenneth, please. Make sure he doesn’t feel sick.’

With the fluency born of long practice, she removed the top from the bottle and filled a syringe. ‘Soon feel better,’ she said to the injured girl, and as Nicol shifted to give her room, she placed the needle next to her skin. ‘I’ll have to stitch it,’ she said, ‘but I promise I’ll make them as tiny as I can. Most of them will be covered by your hair anyway.’

The girl nodded mutely.

‘Do you have to do it here?’ said Nicol. ‘Couldn’t we get her upstairs and do it there?’

‘There’s a WSO patrolling the hangar deck,’ said one of the men.

‘Just let me get on with my job,’ said Frances, with the faintest hint of steel. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’

They were carrying Kenneth out, passing him between them up the ladder, shouting to each other to watch his leg, his head.

‘Your friend here isn’t going to say anything, right?’ Watching them, Jones scratched his head. ‘I mean, can we trust her?’

Nicol nodded. It had taken her several attempts to thread the needle; he saw that her fingers were trembling.

He was struggling to find ways in which he might thank her, express his admiration. Holding her, upstairs, as they danced, he had seen this awkward girl relaxed and briefly illuminated. Now, in this environment, she was someone he no longer recognised. He had never seen a woman so confident in duty and he knew, with a pride he had not felt before, that he was in the presence of an equal.

‘Time?’ said Frances.

‘Four minutes,’ he said.

She shook her head as if faced with a private impossibility. And then he couldn’t think at all. At the first stitch, one of the girl’s friends had passed out, and Frances’s mates were told to take her outside and pinch her awake. The stitching was interrupted again when two of the men started to brawl. He and Jones waded in to separate them. Time inched forward, the hands of his watch moving relentlessly from one digit to the next.

Nicol found himself standing, glancing at the hatch, convinced even over the deafening sound of the engine that he could hear footsteps.

And then she turned to him, face dirty, and flushed from the heat. ‘We’re all right,’ she said, with a brief smile. ‘We’re done.’

‘A little over a minute and a half,’ said Nicol. ‘Come on, we’ve got to get out of here. Leave it,’ he called to the ratings, who had been trying to fix the guard rail. ‘There’s no time. Just help me get her up.’

Margaret and Avice were standing by the hatch on the walkway above them, and Frances motioned to them as if to say they could leave now. Margaret waved as if to say they’d wait.

He stood and offered his hand so that she could stand. She hesitated, then took it, smoothing her hair from her face. He tried not to let his eyes drop to her robe, which now clearly outlined the elegant contours of her chest. Sweat glistened on her skin, running down into the hollow in dirty rivulets. God help me, thought Nicol. There’s an image I’m going to struggle to forget.

‘You’ll need to keep that dry,’ she murmured to the girl. ‘No washing your hair for a couple of days.’

‘Can’t remember the last time I got to wash it anyway,’ the girl muttered.

‘Hang on,’ said Jones-the-Welsh, from beside him. ‘Don’t I know you?’

At first she seemed to assume that he was addressing the injured girl. Then she registered that he was talking to her and something hardened in her expression.

‘You were never at Morotai,’ said Nicol.

‘Morotai? Nah.’ Jones was shaking his head. ‘It wasn’t there. But I never forget a face. I know you from somewhere.’

Frances, Nicol saw, had lost her high colour. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said quietly. She began to gather up her medical kit.

‘Yeees . . . yes . . . I know it’ll come to me.’ Jones shook his head. ‘I never forget a face.’

She stood, one hand lifted to her brow, like someone suffering with a headache. ‘I’d better go,’ she said to Nicol. ‘They’ll be fine.’ Her eyes met his only briefly.

‘I’ll come up with you,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘No, I’ll be fine. Thank you.’

Bits of bandage and kit had skittered under the walkway, but she seemed not to care. She gathered her robe tightly around her, and picked her way past the engine towards the stairs, her kit under her arm.

‘Oh, no . . .’

Nicol tore his gaze from Frances to Jones-the-Welsh. The man was staring at her and shaking his head, bemused. Then a wicked smile flickered across his face.

‘What?’ said Nicol. He was following her towards the ladder and reached for the jacket he had slung over a tool case.

‘No . . . can’t be . . . never . . .’ Jones glanced behind him and suddenly located the man he apparently wanted to speak to. ‘Hey, Duckworth, are you thinking what I’m thinking? Queensland? It isn’t, is it?’ Frances had climbed up the ladder and was now walking towards the other girls, head down.

‘Saw it straight away,’ came the broad Cockney accent. ‘The old Rest Easy. You wouldn’t credit it, would you?’

‘What’s going on?’ said Avice, from above. ‘What’s he talking about?’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Jones-the-Welsh, and burst out laughing. ‘A nurse! Wait till we tell old Kenny! A nurse!’

‘What the hell are you talking about, Jones?’

Jones’s face, when it met Nicol’s, held the same amused smile with which he greeted most of life’s great surprises, whether they were extra sippers, victories at sea or successful cheating at cards. ‘Your little nurse there, Nicol,’ he said, ‘used to be a brass.’

‘What?’

‘Duckworth knows – we came across her at a club in Queensland, must be four, five years ago now.’

His laughter, like his voice, carried over the noise of the engine to the ears of the exhausted men and the brides heading wearily out on to the walkway. Some had stopped, in response to Jones’s exclamation, and were listening.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, man.’ Nicol looked up at Frances, who was nearly at the hatch. She stared straight ahead, and then, perhaps at the end of some unseen internal struggle, allowed herself to glance down at him. In her eyes he saw resignation. He found he had gone cold.

‘But she’s married.’

‘What? To her bludger? Manager’s prize girl, she was! And now look! Can you credit it? She’s turned into Florence Nightingale!’ His burst of incredulous laughter followed Frances’s swift footsteps all the way out of the hatch and back out along the passageway.

15

There was one girl from England,

Susan Summers was her name,

For fourteen years transported was,

We all well knew the same.

Our planter bought her freedom

And he married her out of hand,

Good usage then she gave to us

Upon Van Diemen’s Land.

from ‘Van Diemen’s Land’,

Australian folk song

Australia, 1939

Frances had checked the Arnott’s biscuit tin four times before Mr Radcliffe came. She had also checked the back of the cutlery drawer, in the pot behind the screen door and under the mattress in what had once, many years previously, been her parents’ room. She had asked her mother several times where the money was, and in her mother’s snoring, alcohol-fumed reply the answer was obvious.

But not to Mr Radcliffe. ‘So, where is it?’ he had said, smiling. The same way that a shark smiles when it opens its mouth to bite.

‘I’m real sorry. I don’t know what she’s done with it.’ Her ankle was hooked behind the door to restrict his view inside, but Mr Radcliffe leant to one side and gazed through the screen to where her mother lolled in the armchair. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

‘She’s not very well,’ she said, pulling at her skirt awkwardly. ‘Perhaps when she wakes up she’ll be able to tell me.’

Behind him, she could see two neighbours walking along the street. They murmured something, their eyes trained on her. She didn’t have to hear the words to know the tenor of their conversation. ‘If you want I could stop by later with it?’

‘What? Like your mum did last week? And the week before that?’ He brushed at a non-existent crease in the front of his trousers. ‘I don’t suppose there’s enough left in her purse to buy you a loaf of bread.’

She said nothing. The way he kept hovering, he seemed to expect her to invite him in. But she didn’t want Mr Radcliffe, with his expensive clothes and polished shoes, to sit down in the squalor of their front room. Not before she’d had a chance to put it right.

They faced each other on the porch, locked in an uneasy waiting game.

‘You’ve not been around here for a while.’ It wasn’t quite a question.

‘I’ve been staying with my aunt May.’

‘Oh, yes. She passed on, didn’t she? Cancer, wasn’t it?’

Frances could answer now without her eyes filling. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was there . . . to help her for a bit.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss. You probably know your mother didn’t do too good while you were gone.’ Mr Radcliffe glanced past her through the door, and she fought the urge to close it a little more.

‘She’s . . . dropped behind on her payments. Not just with me. You’ll get no tick at Green’s now, or Mayhew’s.’

‘I’ll manage,’ said Frances.

He turned to the gleaming motor-car that stood in the road. Two boys were peering at themselves in the wing mirror. ‘Your mother was a pretty woman when she worked for me. That’s what the drink does to you.’

She held his gaze.

‘I suppose there’s not a lot I can tell you about her.’

Still she said nothing.

Mr Radcliffe shifted on his feet, then checked his watch. ‘How old are you, Frances?’ he said.

‘Fifteen.’

He studied her, as if assessing her. Then he sighed, as if he were about to do something against his better judgement. ‘Look, I tell you what, I’ll let you work at the hotel. You can wash dishes. Do a bit of cleaning. I don’t suppose you can rely on your mother to keep you. Don’t let me down, mind, or you and she will be out on your ears.’ He had been back there, shooing away the boys before she’d had a chance to thank him.

She had known Mr Radcliffe for most of her life. Most people in Aynsville did: he was the owner of the only hotel, and landlord of several clapboard properties. She could still remember the days when her mother, before the booze tightened its grip, had disappeared in the evening to work at the hotel bar, and Aunt May had looked after her. Later Aunt May rued the day she had told Frances’s mother to go work there – ‘But in a two-horse town like this, love, you got to take the jobs when they come, right?’

Frances’s own experience of the hotel was rather better. For the first year, anyway. Every day, shortly after nine, she would report for work in the back kitchen, alongside a near-silent Chinese man who scowled and raised a huge knife at her if she didn’t wash and slice the vegetables to his satisfaction. She would clean the kitchens, slapping at the floors with a black-tendrilled mop, help prepare food until four, then move on to washing up. Her hands chapped and split with the scalding water; her back and neck ached from stooping at the little sink. She learnt to keep her eyes lowered from the women who sat around bad-temperedly in the mid-afternoon with little to do but drink and bitch at each other. But she had enjoyed earning money and having a little control over what had been a chaotic existence.