Into Suez (3 page)

Nia ran against a tide of women and children forcing their way up the narrow corridor. Pelting back the way she had come, she ran straight into the hands of the Nice Lady. Dragged up to the deck, Nia grizzled quietly and made her limbs go limp and her lips pouty, as the lady struggled to get her into a life jacket. Finally she was handed over to Mrs Brean, who was instructed to keep a firm hold on her, as she was a demon.

‘I won’t run away,’ Nia confided to Babs.

‘How do I know that?’

‘
You’re
not nasty.’ Nia, in a tender gesture her daddy often used, cupped Mrs Brean’s cheek in her palm, just softly, for a moment, so that the woman went still and gazed at the kiddie, surprised.

‘Ah, I expect you want your mum, darling, don’t you?’

‘I won’t be trouble.’ Nia shook her head emphatically.

‘Course you won’t, pet.’

The softened lady melted altogether as Nia raised her arms to allow the life jacket to be slipped off over her head. She held on to the back of Mrs Brean’s skirt as she turned to attend to her own brood, mentioning to a fellow wife the possibility of tombola later and something nice to – you know – when they’d got the kiddies to bed. Babs gestured with her hand, pouring a series of imaginary
drinks into her mouth at top speed, to her companions’ amusement. She did not feel Nia let go and slip back towards the door leading, Nia thought, to the cabins. She ducked beneath a cordon marking off one area of the deck from another. Khaki men in rows further along were being barked at as they struggled into life belts.

Down some stairs, up more. Her sandal-soles drummed on metal as Nia beetled along one passageway and down another. Hand over hand up a ladder. Panic raced along behind but Nia would not allow it to catch up. She burst through a half open metal door that silently closed behind her.

High up Nia stood on an iron platform, with railings, suspended above a gigantic stench. It rose from a room vast as an aircraft hangar she’d visited with her daddy, where she’d marvelled as the entrance was rolled back like a curtain and from the oily guts of the dark building a plane had taxied out. Was there a plane in the ship? Her father loved the oily insides of an aeroplane. Taking Golly out of her waistband, she showed him the sight. He waggled his sticky-outy arms, eyes wide in disbelief.

There was no plane.

The hangar went on for dark, windowless miles as far as Nia could see, dimly lit by lights on the walls. A noise like thunder. Kitbags lay on a net, strung by swaying ropes from iron hooks attached to girders. Nia felt sorry for the kitbags. When her father undid the toggles, you could dig out his wash bag and unroll it, pulling out his comb, greasy from his lovely head. And his razor, flannel and nail clippers, each of which was interestingly dear to her. The kitbags hung above the midget men below. Everything hung from something. For the floor was awash with
vileness. Men lay in hammocks, their heads hanging over the sides. Beside each was a bucket with a mop.

Nia pulled out her abhorred ribbon and held it out over the void. Then she dropped it into the dark stink, watching it fall on to a metal table with three enormous kettles on it, their spouts all pointing forward. She sent her kirby-grip after the ribbon and felt the relief that came when your hair stopped pulling tight. But where was the door? It had somehow become a wall. She panicked; pelted up and down on the platform. Even when she found the iron door, Nia was too puny to pull it open.

It opened from the other side. Nia clung to the man, sheltering under the peak of his cap. She would like such an important cap. His lah-de-dah voice marked him as an officer – even she knew that. Everything would be all right now. She rode in his arms away from the noise and foulness. His name was Alex, he said, and what was her name? Was it Monkey?

No, she said. I am Miss Nia Roberts.

Oh, I thought it was Monkey. Are you sure?

They joked and he jounced her up and down and tossed her in the air and caught her, and Nia laughed with a high pitched squeal, looking anxiously from side to side as they navigated the labyrinth.

The Nice Lady, when found, seemed obscurely more irked with the man in the peaked cap than with the stray child.

‘It is beyond a joke,’ she said.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’

When he went away with a wave of his hand, Nia dismissed and forgot him.

‘I hope you’re well pleased with yourself, madam,’ said the Nice Lady.

‘Yes, thank you.’ Somewhat quenched, Nia clung to the hand that grasped hers.

The Nice Lady looked down sharply, alert for insolence but uncertain of irony.

The cabin was empty but for a shadowy girl tugging back the sheets on the only unclaimed bunk. Ailsa passively observed the stranger’s movements as she dragged a comb through dark, tangled hair without bothering to look in a mirror, bobby pin between her teeth. Seeing that Ailsa was awake, she came over to crouch by her bunk.

‘Feeling rotten?’

‘A bit grim.’

‘I’ve got some salts you sniff. Somewhere. Hang on.’ She rummaged in her bag. ‘No idea why they work but they do seem to help.’

Ailsa breathed in peppermint balm. The stranger’s eyes were liquid and dark, iris melting into pupil, beneath the wings of her eyebrows. Terribly intense but arresting and oddly familiar. An ugly-beautiful face with a large mouth and perfect teeth; skin cinnamon-brown.
I know you from somewhere
. Joe would have called her a
darkie
: how odious of him, and Ailsa was cross with her husband and
a bit ashamed, although he wasn’t there and would have kept quiet if he had been.

‘What I do is stay up on deck as long as I can and get the benefit of the air until I’ve got my sea-legs. Think you could make it if I gave you a hand?’

‘Honestly, I daren’t risk it. You go.’

‘I’m Mona, by the way. Jacobs.’

‘Ailsa Roberts.’

‘Now, what can I get you?’

Her voice was cultivated, every sound precisely pronounced. Toffs’ English. Ailsa lay back against the pillow and craved Lucozade. The girl was no sooner gone than she was back with cherry Corona and ice cubes; ciggies such as Ailsa had never seen before, in a cylindrical tin with its own opener. The ice cubes brought relief. Ailsa’s stomach calmed and the ciggies did the rest. And they cost next to nothing, said Mona. Duty-free. Life will look up now!

‘Wherever did you get all this?’

Ah, so that was it. An officer’s renegade wife, Mona Jacobs was proud of being a misfit amongst
those horrors up there
and clearly ashamed of her husband’s rank. They were socialists, she and her old man, and they wouldn’t
dream
of living it up in a family cabin, knowing, as Ben said, looking at the lists, that there were pregnant women travelling who were packed in like bloody sardines. Can you believe that? So that’s it, Ailsa thought incredulously: you are slumming it with us hoi polloi. You think you’re an angel visiting us from heaven.

A prattling angel. This prohibition on fraternising between officers and ‘men’ was worse than the Montagues and the Capulets, but the visitor didn’t give a damn about
small-minded idiots, why should she? Not every day you met someone you could talk to. Anyway
they
weren’t in the RAF, thank God, were they?
They
hadn’t joined up and signed their lives away like mugs, and just because she was some bod’s wife didn’t mean she answered to his name, rank and number.
You do, you know
, Ailsa thought, looking down, biting her lip so as not to laugh. How did the husband like being referred to as
some bod
or
a mug
? How old was Mona? Mid-twenties perhaps but adolescent in manner, wearing slacks, her loose way of carrying herself a slovenly protest against deportment. She gave Ailsa her full attention, with a close, gentle gaze that only reinforced a tickling sense of
déjà vu
. They stared at one another for a moment.

‘Got it! You’re the motor bike girl? Aren’t you?’

It all came rushing back. The cabin was full of the memory of mad girls in wartime flocking in and out of the flats at Brewers’ Green, the dawn chorus of their voices (on the razzle all night) echoing along the alley, their heels clicking (for their shoe leather was the best), the glossy tops of their heads gleaming in the sun. And all spied from above, through geranium blossom with its cool rainy scent.

It was the girl with the hot water bottle. Mona Serafin. The name echoed back from wherever it had lodged. Her surname was now Jacobs
but I call myself Serafin-Jacobs, double-barrelled. Who wants to give up her own name, I ask you?

They stared, eyes on stalks, giggling, clutching one another. They were back in the war, the party wall breached at last. The women’s eyes glistened with the glow of memory.

This was how Nia found them as she was lugged back
in disgrace from her tour of the ship. Out of control, Mrs Grey said – and quite honestly the staff had better things to do than go chasing round after disobedient girls.

‘Mami!’ Nia cried, bursting into dramatic sobs. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I hope you’re feeling better, Mrs Roberts, because you will have to look after her yourself from now on. You’ve not been smoking of course, ladies. In the cabin.’

‘Oh dear – have one yourself.’ Mona offered the carton. ‘Please do.’

Mrs Grey reddened. She addressed herself exclusively to the mother. The kiddie would have to go back to leading reins if she couldn’t behave properly. Leading reins! How would a big girl like that?

‘I’ve been in the hangar.’

‘Did she say
hangar
?’

‘A big sick bowl with hundreds of men in it.’

‘She’s making it up.’

‘Hanging. In the air. I was looking for the aeroplane.’

Nia scrambled on to the bottom of the bunk and wormed her way up the gap between her mother and the wall. Stuffing the centre of her cot sheet into her mouth, she tossed the rest of it over her face, a flannel veil, and breathed the moist, self-scented, off-white world that accompanied her wherever she went. Ailsa knew Nia feared nothing once she was in her pod.

Mrs Grey explained that Nia had found her way to the troop deck where the soldiers were housed. Yes, in a state of abject squalor, Mona said, it was a disgrace. They were only young boys, many of them conscripts, and they were treated like scum. Typical British idea of democracy: a few dozen officers swanning around in two thirds of the ship
and five hundred human beings living like pigs in the hold. Mrs Grey sat plumb down on a bunk and stared, rhubarb-red, saying she found that a novel view and quite an interesting one. That fighting men should expect the conditions of a luxury liner, well well. However would we have won the war if such a cushy doctrine had prevailed?

‘And your daughter could so easily have fallen to her death,’ she told Ailsa, gently now, for the mother had gone rather pale. She made it clear that she placed the blame squarely on Wing Commander Jacobs’s wife, to whom she referred as a ‘visiting officer’.

‘Oh,
please
, Mrs Grey – don’t embarrass me. I’m just a civilian woman like anyone else.’

‘We take our husbands’ rank, of course.’

‘Oh no,
really
.’

Officers’ wives, however out of line they got, could not be attacked from below. She’ll go for me when you’re not here, thought Ailsa, so shush, do: it’s me, not you, who’ll be in the dog house. In Ailsa’s mind’s eye, Nia swayed high up on a platform. She lost footing, she tripped, she pitched down into the abyss. Ailsa wrapped her arms round her daughter’s body, warm through the cotton, and hugged her close.

Mona raised the question of the monograms on the sheets. ‘They can’t be
swastikas
, surely?’

They were, and some younger women had already taken the law into their own hands and snipped the vile things out with decent English nail scissors. Mrs Grey, at last in agreement with the Wing Commander’s uppity wife, said something must be done. No doubt about
that
. After the war the ship had been requisitioned, lock, stock and barrel, from the German navy and converted, with the
least possible expense, to British use. The
Reichsemerald
had become the
Empire Glory
. She was due to be broken up after this voyage. Mrs Grey left them on reasonably amicable terms. Thank heaven, thought Ailsa.

The Wing Commander’s wife patted her lap, inviting Nia to climb up and have a Wagon Wheel and Corona. The child needed no encouragement. She cradled her beaker, smiling over the rim, sipping and jingling the ice cubes. Mona presented her full face, gravely attentive. She seemed to loom, all eyes, at Nia, who stared straight back

‘Lady,’ she said. ‘You need a damn good wash, my girl.’

Ailsa’s face flamed; Nia meant, she knew, (but did Mona cotton on?) Mona’s dark skin.

Without batting an eyelid, Mona explained that she was meant to be like this. You should be happy with who you are, she explained. Always.

‘So let me touch it then.’

‘Go on – that’s fine.’

Most delicately, Nia stroked the dark lady’s face with the backs of her fingers. A beautiful look stole into her eyes, an expression caught from her father. She cupped Mona’s chin in both palms and nuzzled noses. Then she gave her a kiss, breaking through every convention into an intimacy that was its own courtesy. Ailsa saw how struck the woman was – the childless woman, who mirrored back Nia’s unembarrassed gaze, dark eyes swimming. Mona looked, Ailsa thought, amazed and sad. But she’d have her own kiddies one day. And then this ocean of simple love that blessed them would be an everyday given of her existence too.
The bliss it has been
, Ailsa thought,
to be your mother, Nia
. The thought rocked her.

Tranquil, Ailsa’s daughter sat in the stranger’s lap,
humming to herself, her thin ginger hair and pale skin making a strong contrast with Mona’s darkness as she folded a shy arm around Nia’s middle. It was an episode of extraordinary peace. Ailsa of course had to spoil it with her nerves. She came in with, ‘Nia is the limit, she really is. Oh, I’m so sorry.’

‘She can only know what the world tells her.’ Mona nuzzled the top of Nia’s head with her chin.

‘Mona, I didn’t…’

‘Course you didn’t. Unfortunately, Ailsa, you aren’t
the world
.’

No, I’m its tannoy, Ailsa thought, ashamed, as they left the cabin to go up to the mess. Its wireless set.

Babs Brean sang out, ‘Still green round the gills, Mrs Roberts? Better eat while you can. Wait till you get to the Bay of Biscay!’

She winked at a bleached woman, with whom she’d struck up an instant and intimate acquaintance. Bosom pals they’d become in a trice and it seemed to Ailsa as if the women had all sought out partners in whom to stow their secrets, so that they could anchor themselves in gossip on the lurching world of the
Empire Glory
. They walked about coupled like the animals in the Ark. And just as easily as they’d fallen into step, these sudden little unions would be dissolved when they set foot on dry land.

And Mona and she were the same, but caught up in a past, which lay around them like a strangely glowing mist.
It’s you, it’s really you
, Ailsa thought and in her mind the relationship they’d
almost
had took on an aura of mystery and meaning. The memory of the day she’d realised that the next door girls had left the Old Brewery returned with exaggerated significance, as if it had marked an epoch in
her life. Oh those girls: their philosophy and emotionalism, their all-night parties and the operatic arias in the bath. They’d vanished – but at first she’d hardly noticed. She’d been married by then, to Joe who was everything. All Ailsa’s passion had poured into her only-just-consummated marriage. But when Hitler had thrown the doodlebugs at London, Ailsa had looked up in mid-word, fountain pen in hand, from writing to her husband in Italy – and registered her neighbours’ absence.

She’d known then, known for sure, that she was about to die. The rattling rocket halted over her head. A moment of pure evil. You had a few seconds until it blew you apart. Ailsa’s mind had flicked sideways to the neighbouring flat. Empty! As empty as it had been for days, weeks. She’d hardly missed the girls’ bright presence. No time for any valedictions. Alone, she was alone.

She heard the doodlebug hit – someone else. Oh, thank you, God.

Now she learned that the girls had left the Old Brewery when they’d had enough of being glorified secretaries at the Ministry. Mona and Bobbie had joined the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, resettling slave workers and concentration camp victims. At first Mona had worked from an office in Birmingham; then at the end of the war she’d been drafted to Lübeck in North Germany. Met up again with her old man and married him.

‘We thought you so glamorous in those days, Ailsa, I can’t tell you.’

‘
Me
glamorous! You can’t be serious.’

‘You’ve no idea how we used to discuss you and speculate on what it was you did and who exactly you were.’

‘You’re joking.’ Ailsa grinned, liking the idea.
Obviously they’d glamorised her young isolation, casting her as a figure dauntlessly modern, who went her own way and exemplified some kind of unreal
Zeitgeist
.

‘We decided you were a spy! Were you a spy?’

‘Oh yes.’

They giggled. A spy was just about it, although what you witnessed from your window was bound to be skewed. As what they’d seen of her was skewed. Perspective conferred mystery – and especially to those ultra-educated types, whose whole minds were occupied with cerebral romance – thinking about Thought, existentially in love with Sartre and de Beauvoir, names she’d caught from next-door and looked up in Marylebone Library. Ailsa’s shy solitude had turned her into a storybook girl for those gilded Oxford types, ignorant of the fact that her lack of a single pair of nylons could reduce Ailsa to tears, as she pulled on lisle stockings lumpy with darns or went bare-legged.
They
wouldn’t have minded bare legs. Bohemians didn’t. For they could have dressed from head to foot in silk if they’d liked. They’d never have fathomed that Ailsa struggled to summon courage to order fish and chips in the Corner House. They’d seen a modern girl who walked alone – and not only straddled a bike but understood its innards, sleeves rolled up like a mechanic and oil to the elbows. They’d heard her whistling perhaps, for at times (and how could Ailsa have forgotten this?) she really had felt like that – a free spirit.

No mother of a dependent child could dream or claim such licence. The Wing Commander’s lady wife would soon see through her. For now I am prosaic, she thought ruefully. And yet, accepting a cup of cocoa from the urn,
sipping to see if it would stay down, a rebellious spirit spoke up in Ailsa. I am not the common run. Anyone with eyes can see that.