Page 70 of The Ship of Brides
So they waited. And Frances, after a moment’s hesitation, sat down, the dirty plates piled high in front of her. She told them in quiet, unemotional tones, her words the polar opposite to Avice’s gush of love. She had met him in Malaya while she had been nursing. Private Engineer ‘Chalkie’ Mackenzie, twenty-eight years old. From a town called Cheltenham. He had shrapnel wounds, which had become infected because of the tropical humidity. She had nursed him and, over the weeks, he had grown fond of her.
‘Sometimes, when he had a fever, he became delirious and thought we were already married. We weren’t meant to form attachments with the men, but his captain, who was in the next bed, indulged him. We all did. We went along with all sorts if it made the men feel better.’
‘So, when did he ask you?’ said Jean. Above her, the neon lights came on abruptly, illuminating the women’s faces.
‘Well... he asked me lots of times, actually. There wasn’t really one occasion. I think it was about sixteen before I agreed.’
‘Sixteen times!’ said Avice. It was as if she couldn’t believe Frances could provoke such persistence.
‘What made you say yes?’ said Margaret. ‘In the end, I mean.’
‘What made him keep asking?’ muttered Avice.
But Frances stood up and glanced at her watch. ‘Goodness, Maggie! Look at the time. That dog of yours will be desperate for her walk.’
‘Oh, darn. You’re right. Better get back downstairs,’ said Margaret. With a nod to the others, she and Frances half walked, half ran towards the cabin.
The girls were kissing. They did it once, briefly, then turned to look at him, and laughed at his failure to react. The shorter one leant back on her bar stool, eyeing him lazily, then stretched out a bare leg. The other, in a green dress several sizes too big for her slight frame, muttered something he didn’t understand, and leant forwards to ruffle his hair. ‘Two two.’ She held up two fingers. ‘Very nice time. Two two.’ Initially, he had ordered them both another drink. It had taken him several minutes to understand what she was suggesting. Then he shook his head, even when she reduced the price to almost a third of the original amount. ‘No more money,’ he said, his words sounding strange and unfocused to his ears. ‘All gone.’
‘No no,’ the girl in the green dress said. It was as if she had heard refusals too many times, and that they had all been meaningless. ‘Two two. Very nice time.’
At some point in the evening he had lost his watch, and no longer had any idea what time it was. Men catcalled or fought incompetently in the street outside. Girls disappeared upstairs, came down again and chattered or squabbled with their colleagues. Outside, the neon bar sign cast the blue light of a cold grey dawn across the entrance.
On the wall behind the girls he could see a picture of Eisenhower, probably donated by some visiting GI. What time was it in America? Nicol tried to recall how he had calculated the difference earlier that evening.
Across the room, half seated, half lying on a banquette, Jones-the-Welsh was placing cigarettes in a girl’s mouth and laughing as she coughed them out again. ‘Don’t inhale so much,’ he was saying, as she hit him playfully with a slim hand. ‘You’re making yourself ill.’ He caught Nicol watching him. ‘Ah... no... Don’t tell me you like Annie here too?’ he called. ‘Greedy bastard. You’ve got two of your own already.’
Nicol tried to formulate some reply, but it turned to powder in his mouth.
‘To wives and sweethearts,’ Jones-the-Welsh announced, his drink aloft. ‘May they never meet.’
Nicol raised his glass to his mate and took a slug. ‘And no rubbish tip,’ he muttered. Jones, just about hearing him, burst out laughing.
Their last visit to Ceylon had comprised duty, not leave, and they had been charged with the ‘drunk patrol’, looking for ratings who, weighed down by their paypackets but unencumbered by either sense or inhibition, took advantage of their few hours’ freedom to drink as much as possible of whatever local brew they could find with disastrous results. Shortly before dawn, he and Jones, having emptied several of the local brothels, had found several young hands lying comatose at the base of a local rubbish tip. Over the course of their night out, they had evidently been relieved of money, watches, paybooks and even station cards, and were now incapable of either thought or speech. Not knowing without those documents who the men were, he and Jones, after some discussion, had dumped them, soiled, stinking uniforms and all, on the nearest Allied ship. There they would await a double dose of wrath – from the superiors of their adopted ship and from those they belonged to.
‘Too right. No rubbish tip for us, mate,’ said Jones, lifting a glass. ‘Just remember to sayViceroy. Got it? Just you remember the name of your ship.Viceroy.’ And he burst out laughing again.
‘You come now.’
The girl in the green dress was tugging his sleeve. The other had vanished. She closed her hand round his with the proprietorial confidence of a child and led him up the stairs. He had to let go of her to negotiate them, clutching the banister as the wooden steps rose and fell beneath his feet like a deck in a storm.
The door of the room was paper light in his hand; the fragility of the dividing walls apparent in the noises he could hear from the next room.
‘Nice time, uh?’ The girl followed his gaze and giggled.
He felt suddenly weary, and seated himself heavily on the side of the bed, watching as she undid her dress. The knobs of her spine were distinct under her pale skin. It made him think of Frances, of her bony fingers as she had held the picture of his boys.
‘You help me?’ she said, twisting nimbly to look at him, and gesturing towards her zip.
The thin coverlet was immaculately laundered. Beside it, on a rickety table, stood a bottle with several beautifully arranged blossoms. These two domestic details, a suggestion of some desire far removed from the depravity he could hear in the next room, made his eyes fill with tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t think—’
She turned, and he caught something raw in her expression. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, her smile rapidly in place again. ‘You be happy man. I see you before? You know me. I make you happy man.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
She clasped his hand then, in a surprisingly firm grip. Her glance towards the door told him that perhaps she had her own reasons for not wanting him to leave. ‘You wait little while,’ she pleaded.
‘I just want to—’
