A Stone's Throw (3 page)

Careful not to lose her way, Meg walked to her cabin. She wanted to be left alone; she had dreamed of it, coming on this ship. That was something she liked about George – he didn’t ask her about her family because she was to leave it all behind in marrying him.

Everything in the cabin was as she had left it. Nothing had
been picked up and put down; nothing had been wept over. She was so glad to be by herself. She lay down to sleep and prayed she would not dream.

Over breakfast, Meg continued with her letter:

I am still waking at 5.30, but no cows to milk here. Just now I am eating fresh grapefruit, with bacon and egg to follow. You wouldn’t believe there was a war on, for all the food. I am making up for lost time. I hope the soldiers are getting some of it too
.

Through the window I can see first of all the sea, which is a bit rough, and then in the distance the next ship in the convoy. It is a comfort to see it, just in case we run into any problems. Though by the time you read this, any such problems will be over with
.

I have met a nice couple called the Richardsons. She is nice, anyway, and Mr Richardson is quite important. He writes for the newspapers. He tells us it is to be a quick passage. Eighteen days more, all being well
.

Could you send my best regards to Mrs Williamson and to the Tierneys? I didn’t have time to say goodbye to them. I slept soundly and I didn’t have any nightmares …

She paused, wondering how her mother would manage; who she would find to listen to her, comfort her.

… I hope you have not had any either. I hope that Mrs Gray is looking in each day like she promised …

She put down her pen and looked at the strangers eating breakfast nearby at the other tables: a middle-aged couple, two elderly gentlemen, a clergyman and a woman who was surely his sister, not his wife, a couple of men in smart suits. None of them needed her; when she got up, nobody would ask her where she was going; or how long she would be; or whether they could join her in her bed that night if sleep was hard. She could do as she chose. She was no longer the one who remained. She would have preferred not to be travelling during a war, but just now she would rather be here, in a convoy, hoping a U-boat didn’t find them, than back at home with her mother. She smiled, thinking this. It was something she could never explain, not even to George. Especially not to George.

After breakfast, the siren rang for the lifeboat drill. Meg went to the day lounge, which was her muster station. She wore her new winter coat beneath the lifejacket. The life-jacket, with four big cubes of cork around the neck, made it difficult to move easily. But she had been told to put it on, as she would if there were a real emergency. The lounge was full. Women carried their handbags, like pantomime penguins in their cork jackets, and men smoked pipes or cigarettes. Mr Richardson made notes in a small notebook. A group of four still played bridge at one end. Somebody picked out a tune on the piano. Everybody had to attend the drill, unless they were
ill. Meg’s lifeboat was Number Six, port side. The Richardsons were to go to Number Eight.

‘Coffee together afterwards,’ Mrs Richardson said.

Meg went out onto the promenade deck with the other Number Six passengers. The officer in charge explained that if they had to evacuate the ship, each lifeboat would have a number of sailors and a number of passengers. Further down the deck was another group of passengers beneath another lifeboat, and beyond them she glimpsed some soldiers. Number Six lifeboat hung ten feet or more above them, level with the boat deck. She looked up at it while an officer went through the drill: how it would be lowered on its davits till it was level and they would get in. Then the designated lifeboat crew would lower it to the water, shimmy down the falls – those were the ropes – before unclipping them; how it contained food and water, first-aid equipment, eight oars to row with – best leave them to the sailors – and flares for getting rescued. How they were to follow instructions from the duty officer, which would probably be him. It was all very organised. Meg looked around at the other passengers. They were listening attentively; she supposed they felt their lives might depend on it.

There was something homely about the lifeboat, she thought, with its white overlapping planking, solid and fresh-painted. It was like a garden shed hung up there. But she couldn’t imagine sitting in it; not out here in the middle of the ocean. It looked far too small to stay above the water.

Each morning there was lifeboat drill and Meg grew accustomed to the idea of launching into the ocean in something so small. The Captain had explained on the first night that it would take five days’ journey to sail beyond range of the U-boats. When they reached that point, their destroyer escorts would turn back and they would go on their merry way to South Africa. As the first calm day gave way to the next, and that to the next again, as those passengers who suffered seasickness recovered and the privations and pressures of wartime England receded, a holiday spirit began to spread among the passengers. They were so nearly out of danger, Meg thought, and it became harder each day to imagine something coming upon them out of the blue and blowing it all apart. Even the news from home seemed inflected by their mood, as though the RAF had them, chugging their way across the Atlantic, to thank for recent triumphs in the skies over London.

The days passed, the sea stayed calm and the lifeboats with their shiny white hulls stayed suspended. Meg had settled in to life on the ship with surprising ease. But though each day might be a day closer to safety, it was also a day closer to her marriage; and she knew, as well as she allowed herself to, that she didn’t love George.

On the third day Meg took coffee with Mrs Richardson, as her habit now was, after the lifeboat drill. They sat outside, just warm enough. Meg turned her face to the sun for its bit of heat.

‘I was thirteen when I saw the sea for the first time,’ Meg said. She made her voice bright because she was telling a story.
They sat in deck chairs and sipped coffee. Mrs Richardson had her hair caught up in a bandana and a silk wrap draped around her shoulders. She wore red slacks, and a grey sweater belonging to Mr Richardson. Meg thought she looked very sophisticated.

‘The vicar’s wife organised a day trip for the village children,’ she said.

‘You’d never seen the sea before?’ Mrs Richardson said. ‘I can’t imagine.’

‘Everybody else ran straight down to the water. I stood up on the promenade. Mrs Rogers – the vicar’s wife – she had to persuade me. She said afterwards that I stood there with my mouth open.’

She draws a circle on the glass where it’s misted. It’s going to be a mouth with eyes but it drips down to the sill and becomes a spider
.
Through the window she sees her dad and there is Will hop-skipping
,
down to the end of the road over the white snow; they go around the corner
.

She makes another spider on the window. It squeaks when she presses it with her finger tip. She watches the corner
.
A man goes past the window and then a woman
.
Jimmy Tullock and John Tullock go past
.
They run, because they are late for school
,
like always
.

She drags a chair to the coat hooks and pulls down her coat
.
In the kitchen her mother cries
.
It’s cold because the fire isn’t lit this morning
.
Her mother has the matches and she is lighting and burning them so they are black from tip to tail
.
One, and then another, and another
.

‘
You can save a sailor if you burn the whole match,’ her mother says
in her normal voice, but there are still tears coming out of her eyes
.

‘
I saw the Tullocks, so I’m going to school now,’ Meg says
.

She strokes her mother’s lap; she can’t see where the hurt is. She goes and fetches the plaid rug off the old chair where her father always sits. Bits and crumbs fall on the floor. It’s heavy and it smells of tobacco
.

‘
This will make you better,’ she says
.

She pulls and heaps it on her mother’s lap
.

‘
There now,’ she says. ‘Bye bye
.’

Outside Meg walks beside her brother’s footprints until she reaches the road. Now there are lots and she doesn’t know which are his. The snow goes on and on, as far as she can see. It doesn’t have any edges
.

‘I can’t imagine,’ Mrs Richardson said again. ‘Your mother never took you? No seaside holidays?’

‘No.’ Meg sipped her coffee and looked out across the waves. It was odd, this talking to strangers. Back home she would never have done it. She would never have met Mrs Richardson back home, and once they were in Africa, they would probably never meet again.

‘Can you swim?’ she said.

‘Like a fish,’ Mrs Richardson said, ‘but makes no difference either way, as long as you’ve got your life jacket on. So our sailor always insists. So I tell Mr Richardson. He doesn’t want to carry his life jacket around.’

‘I wish I could, even so,’ Meg said.

Mrs Richardson stood up and excused herself. ‘Must go and see what my husband is up to.’

Meg was getting cold, sitting so still. She wrapped her hands tight beneath her armpits. She had never had so much time and so little to do with it. She should be enjoying it, for all they were at sea and there was a war on.

In eleven days they would arrive. George would meet her and soon after they would marry. He had bought Meg’s wedding ring already. It had cost £5 – he’d underlined the figure in his letter – and it was waiting for her in Africa. He was looking forward to putting it on her finger. He was looking forward to her being Mrs George Garrowby.

She should write a bit more to her mother. She picked up her handbag and lifejacket and nodded to the other deckchairs. She should go inside, but she didn’t want to, and instead she set off towards the other end of the ship, ducking quickly under the rope cordon half way along.

She was nearly there when she saw the soldiers. Along walkways, up ladders, down steep metal stairs, her shoe heels clanging. It shouldn’t have been such a shock.

They had their backs to her, hundreds of them. She could have counted, rows by columns, multiplied them. They were doing a drill, lifting guns up and down, while an officer shouted from the far end. She’d seen plenty of men in uniform in the last year. Each of the boys from the village got his farewell down the main street. But she’d known them; been at school with most of them. These were strangers.

She narrowed her eyes and stared. Two in the back row: they were the right build. She had to guess – she always had to guess – but she was sure he’d be about that height. Middling,
her mother called it, like her. And one of them had the same kind of hair. It was darker, but his would be darker now, too. Her mother used to make a circle with her finger in his hair: ‘Crown fit for a king,’ she used to say.

There was another in front of them, a ginger-haired boy. He looked nothing like Will; was too young probably, yet … She narrowed her eyes still further, till the soldiers were no more than a series of grainy movements. What was it about him? If he were two foot smaller and if his gun were a stick and his uniform a pair of pyjamas, and if he didn’t have ginger hair, then …

‘You’d think the stick was his life.’ She could hear her mother’s voice. It was the same voice she’d use when Will got muddy, or tore his clothes.

‘Boys will be boys,’ Meg said to herself.

That was how the ginger-haired soldier held his gun, too, close-in to his head, caressing almost.

There was nothing about George that reminded her of Will. She’d never thought this before, but it was true.

The officer shouted and the soldiers wheeled. She felt the clap of their hands and the beat of their boots. She’d know him anywhere: by the curve of his brow, or how he walked, or by his eyes; she knew she would. Her mother’s fingers in his hair and Will pulling away, impatient to be off, away on his adventure.

They were so handsome in their uniforms; alive and strong and on their way to fight. Each time something caught her eye – a turn of the head, the light on their hair – she’d look again, because it might be …

Then she’d look away.

Again a shout, again the soldiers wheeled round, shouldering, unshouldering; as he came to the head of the line, the ginger-haired soldier looked up at her, and she turned and went.

In her cabin she did as her mother would have told her and shut the blind over the porthole and lay down for twenty minutes. The air was warm, but she was shaking, so she pulled a blanket over, tucking it up beneath her chin, catching it under her feet.

The bed lamp made a small, safe circle and she was at the heart of it. She opened the bible and read about Jacob tricking his brother, then wrestling with the angel. There had been a picture of Jacob and the angel on the Sunday School wall. Alice said they were kissing.

Meg woke late in the afternoon. Her mouth was dry and she felt nauseous. She got up, ran a deep bath and lay submerged till her skin puckered in the warm salt water. She felt sad and though the water grew cold, it was a struggle to get out. Before going to dinner she wrote a few lines to her mother:

… I saw the soldiers parading today and thought of the lads in the village going off. James Pedley, and the Andrews boys especially. Please write to me with any news of them
.

It’s funny but it doesn’t feel dangerous on this ship. Perhaps because it’s so luxurious, and because we have been lucky with
the weather. But I have had enough of it and wish we could be there sooner, for all the lovely food and time
.

She went to dinner early to avoid the Richardsons, and sat at a table between two elderly gentlemen. They told stories about cricket and diamond mining and they let her be. She was served with Lancashire hot pot and ice cream with tinned peaches, but though she tried, she didn’t manage to eat much. Still she nodded and laughed when it was expected and the meal passed off all right.