Sheltering Rain (22 page)

Joy looked up at the Captain, who had been briefly silenced by Pieter's nonappearance, and then at Stella, who looked equally nonplussed.

“Perhaps he's off trading,” the Captain joked. “I'd better get the cook to go and check on our stores.” He stood, and gazed around him, evidently wondering what to do next.

He was interrupted by a sudden whisper at the other end of the dining room. It spread down the line of tables like a soft wind, so that Joy, following its direction, eventually caught sight of its object. All eyes landed on Georgina Lipscombe, who walked unsteadily through the doors at the end, her hair now loosened from the peaked cap, and hanging in loose curls around her shoulders. She staggered slightly, trying to catch her balance, and reached out to hold the back of an unoccupied chair.

Joy stared at her, trying to take in the significance of what she was seeing, and then looked over at Stella, who had gone quite gray.

For Georgina Lipscombe's immaculate naval whites were now less than pristine. From her epaulets down to somewhere around the middle of her thighs, Mrs. Lipscombe's uniform bore a smudged, but definite imprint of boot polish.

Georgina, apparently oblivious, stared at the faces turned toward her, and then, her head lifted, evidently decided to ignore them. Reaching their table, she sat down, somewhat heavily, in her chair, and lit up a cigarette. There was a brief, loaded silence.

And then: “You absolute tart!” yelled Stella, and flew at her across the table, grabbing her hair, her epaulets, any bit of spare flesh or uniform she could reach before Louis and the First Officer could leap from their own seats to try to pull her off. Joy, stunned and frozen, simply stood, not recognizing this wild-eyed banshee as her friend, her veils tearing and ripping from her costume as she scrambled to get a better hold. “You bloody, bloody tart!” Stella shouted, crying now, her elaborate dancing-girl makeup already streaked around her eyes. Louis managed to grab her arm, forcing her to relinquish her grip on Georgina's hair, but it was some seconds before either man felt quite confident enough to let her go.

“Shhh, now dear,” said Mrs. Fairweather, stroking her hair as the men sat her down again. “Come on. Calm down. There's quite enough excitement for one night.”

The entire dining hall was silenced. The Captain motioned to the band to start playing again, but there was a long, pregnant pause before they tentatively rediscovered their place in the music. Around them, the other diners stared wide-eyed, laughing in shocked tones or shaking their heads in disapproval, as they slowly returned their attention to their own tables.

Georgina, her hair matted and bunched on one side where Stella had grabbed it, placed a hand to her face, checking for blood. Seeing no evidence of it on her fingers, she gazed around her on the tablecloth, looking for the lit cigarette that had been knocked out of her hand. It was floating, rather forlornly, in Mrs. Fairweather's drink. She calmly removed another from her silver cigarette case, and lit it. Then she lifted her head and gazed back at Stella.

There was a brief silence.

“You silly girl,” she said, exhaling a long plume of smoke. “You didn't think you were the only one, did you?”

J
oy sat outside on the starboard deck, her arms around the sobbing Stella, wondering how long it would be before she could gently point out the fact that not only were they both soaked, but also her teeth were beginning to chatter.

Stella had cried for more than twenty minutes now, apparently oblivious to the freezing sea spray, and the lurching deck, seemingly conscious only of her own misery as she huddled into Joy's damp and mournful embrace.

“I can't believe he lied to me,” she gasped, during a brief interlude from sobbing. “All those things he said . . .”

Joy chose not to dwell on what they might have been. Or what they might have led to.

“She's so awful as well. She's old, for God's sake.” Stella gazed at Joy through eyes swollen with tears. Her voice was incredulous. “She's got a hard face, and she wears too much makeup. She's even got
stretch marks
.”

It was not so much that Pieter had cheated on her, Joy was beginning to suspect. It was what Stella saw as his indiscriminate choice of partner.

“Oh, Joy . . . What am I going to do?”

Joy thought back to Pieter Brandt's return to the dining table. He had laughed and made a couple of off-color jokes at first, his inebriation preventing him from picking up on the fact that the table had greeted him in stony silence. Then his laughter had become rather forced, and he had told another funny anecdote, as if trying to restore the mood. But when the Captain came and plonked the bottle of champagne in front of him, curtly announcing “You're the winner” before walking off again, Pieter had apparently, finally, twigged the fact that all was not as it had been when he disappeared some half an hour previously.

“You might need to touch up your boot polish, old boy,” Louis had said, staring pointedly at Pieter's pale chest, and then equally pointedly at Georgina's stained frontage.

For obvious reasons it had been impossible to tell whether Pieter had actually gone white, but he had glanced anxiously around at his fellow travelers, and then briefly excused himself, saying that he needed to “stretch his legs.” Georgina had looked bored, sucking on her ever-present cigarette and managing to stare into the distance while not actually meeting anyone else's eye. Eventually, apparently peeved by the lack of male attention, she had left the table after him.

But Stella had already gone by then, escorted to the rest room by Mrs. Fairweather, who had wiped vainly at her face with an ill-suited lace handkerchief and appealed to Stella to just stop crying. “You looked so pretty with your makeup,” she wittered. “You don't want to let that woman see she's got you all upset.” She had looked rather relieved when Joy came in, and had handed Stella over with a touch too much enthusiasm and gratitude. “You two are friends,” she said. “You know how to cheer her up. You'll tell her.” And then, in a cloud of Arpège, beads, and translucent fabric, she had disappeared.

“What am I going to do?” said Stella, a half hour later, staring out at the black and frothing sea. “Everything's finished. Maybe I should just . . .”

Joy followed Stella's gaze across the deck and tightened her grip on her friend's arm.

“Don't you dare talk like that,” she said, suddenly panicked. “Don't you dare even think like that, Stella Hanniford.”

Stella turned to face her, her expression suddenly free from all artifice and guile.

“But what am I going to do, Joy? I've ruined everything, haven't I?”

Joy took Stella's cold hands in her own.

“You've ruined nothing. You just got a little too close to a stupid, stupid man, who, after tomorrow, you will never, ever have to see again.”

“But that's the awful thing, Joy. Part of me
wants
to see him again.”

Stella looked back at her, her big blue eyes wide with misery. She relinquished one of Joy's hands, and pushed her hair back from her face.

“He was absolutely wonderful. Much better than Dick. And that's the worst thing—how can I go back to Dick and pretend that everything's okay when I've felt something so much more?”

Joy felt sick. Part of her wanted to block her ears, to say to Stella, “Stop! I don't want to know!” But she was conscious that she was Stella's only possible confidante. The only confidante of someone who, while always a little on the dramatic side, had gazed out at those waves in a frankly unnerving manner.

“You've got to forget him,” she said eventually. Uselessly. “You've got to make it work with Dick.”

“But what if I shouldn't have married Dick in the first place? Oh, I was in love with him, I'll grant you. But what on earth did I know? I'd only kissed two men before I met him. How did I know I'd end up liking someone else better?”

“Dick's a good man,” said Joy, thinking of the handsome, affable pilot. “You were so happy together. You can be again.”

Stella began to cry again. “But I don't feel like it. I don't want to have to smile at him, and kiss him, and let him press his horrid old body against me. I wanted Pieter . . . and now I'm going to be stuck with someone I don't love anymore for the rest of my life.”

Joy placed her arms around her friend again, and gazed at the dark sky. There were hardly any stars tonight, the constellations being obscured by the low, mucky clouds.

“It will all be all right,” she murmured, into Stella's cold ear. “I promise. It will all look better in the morning.”

“How do you know?” said Stella, lifting her head again.

“Because things always are. I always feel better in the daylight.”

“No, not that. How do you know that you've made the right choice?”

Joy thought for a minute, not wanting to give the wrong answer. She thought, briefly, of Louis.

“I suppose you don't,” she said, eventually. “You just have to hope.”

“But
you
do.
You
know.”

Joy was briefly silent.

“Yes,” she said.

“How?”

“Because I don't feel properly comfortable around anyone else. Being with him . . . it's like being with you . . . except with the love thing added.”

She glanced at Stella, who was gazing at her attentively.

“I suppose I feel like he's the male version of me. The better half. When I'm around him, I just want to live up to his version of me. I don't want to disappoint him.”

Joy could picture him now, smiling at her, his eyes wrinkled at the corners, his teeth just visible below his upper lip.

“I never really cared what anyone thought of me until he came along,” she said. “And now, I can't believe it's me he's chosen. Every morning I wake up and thank God that he did. Every night I go to bed praying that time will go that much faster so that I can be with him again. I think all the time about what he's doing, who he's talking to. Not in a jealous way, or anything. I just want to be closer to him, and if I can imagine what he's doing, then that helps.”

He would be asleep now, she thought. Or reading a book. Probably one of his bloodstock books, full of lines of horses stretching back generations, building his dreams on an equine family tree.

“He's more than I ever asked for. More than I ever hoped for,” she said, half dreamily. “I just can't imagine ever being with anyone else.”

There was a brief pause. Joy realized she had almost forgotten Stella was there.

But Stella was raising herself from their seat near the lifeboats. She had stopped crying, and was pulling her shawl tightly around her against the cold.

Joy pushed herself upright, and wiped the wet hair from her face.

“Yes, well, you're lucky,” Stella said, not looking Joy in the eye. “It's been easy for you.”

Joy began to stand, too, frowning slightly at her friend's tone.

Stella walked toward the door, and then turned, so that her parting shot blew back at Joy, caught on the night spray. “Yes, much easier for you. No one else ever wanted to be with you, after all.”

S
abine sat on the floor, in the center of the threadbare Persian rug, staring at the picture of Stella in her evening dress. The muted shades of the tired room she occupied had temporarily receded, replaced by heaving, rain-lashed decks and the shimmering satin and sparkle of seven or so waterlogged sequined veils.

“Did she go back to Dick in the end?” She gazed at the twinkling eyes, the knowing smile, trying unsuccessfully to imagine this girl desolate and abandoned on a wet ship. She looked too sure of herself somehow.

Joy, who had been sorting through a box of old certificates, peered over Sabine's shoulder.

“Stella? Yes, but not for long.”

Sabine turned to face her, waiting for an explanation. Joy put her box down on her knees, and thought for a minute. “He did adore her, but I think her feelings for Pieter Brandt rather shook her up, and after awhile, when no children came along, I think she felt she decided she would rather have a bit of excitement elsewhere.”

“So, what happened next?”

Joy rubbed at her hands, to try and dislodge some of the dust. She was glad that she and Sabine were talking again, but it was a little wearing the way Sabine tended to pursue everything. She took a deep breath, as if bracing herself, as Stella had done all those years earlier, to deliver bad news.

“She went through rather a lot of men in the end. Never quite settled with anyone.”

“A bit racy,” said Sabine, gleefully. She had rather liked the sound of Stella.

“I suppose you could say that. She certainly had a good time when she was younger. It was when she got older that she became a bit sad. Used to drink rather too much.”

Joy rubbed at her eye, which had become gritty. “Her last husband died of liver failure, and after she lost him I think it hit home that she didn't really have anyone. She was sixty-two by then, you see. Rather a hard age to be totally by oneself.”

Sabine tried to imagine the glowing, glamorous figure before her not just abandoned, but as a lonely old drinker.

“Did she die?”

“Yes. Only a few years ago. In ninety-two I think it was. We had kept in touch, but she moved to a little apartment on the Spanish coast, and we never really saw each other after that. I discovered she'd died only because her niece sent me a rather sweet letter.” Joy paused, looking temporarily distracted. “Right. I think I should probably get rid of all these old rosettes. They look a bit moldy. What a pity.”

Sabine put the photographs back into the box in front of her, trying to imagine her own mother in the place of Stella Hanniford. She was less glamorous than Stella, but on present form she could easily plow her way through loads of men and end up alone in some Spanish apartment. Sabine had a sudden vision of herself, visiting her, while her mother reclined on a scruffy sofa, clutching a bottle of rioja, reminiscing drunkenly about those she had left behind. “Ahh, Geoff,” she would say, her red hair hanging tattily around her shoulders, her lipstick smeared gaily across her mouth. “That was a good year. Geoff. Or was it George? I always get them mixed up.”