A Quiet Life(10)

‘Just once. And once from Southampton to France, and down to Morocco and Egypt.’

Laura asked nothing about his travels, but someone as determined to talk as Joe was not to be put off by a lack of direct questions. He told Laura about the boat he’d taken to north Africa, about the film playing that afternoon in the ship’s cinema, which he had seen the previous week in New York, and he called the steward over for hot coffee. In such loquacious company Laura could relax a little, knowing that nothing was expected of her.

At one point he stopped and looked at the newspaper which Laura had put down at her feet. ‘You’re not a Red too, are you?’

‘Florence gave it to me—’

‘Still, they’re right about some things,’ Joe said, taking the newspaper and looking at the front page. ‘At least they get what’s going on in Europe. They don’t do the “if only, if only” – you know, “if only he was a nicer guy or he would accept this or that” – they can see that kind of stuff is all baloney, that there’s got to be a showdown sooner or later.’

At this, Laura said nothing. She and her mother and sister had all convinced one another that war was a long way off, and even if they had done so simply because they wanted to believe that a trip to London was still possible, the conviction was now hard to throw off. Joe went on talking, about what he couldn’t stand about communism, how they wanted everyone to toe the line. ‘They want everyone to be the same,’ he was saying.

To her own surprise, Laura found herself shaking her head. She had only that one article to go on, but she found herself saying something, which sounded inarticulate even to herself, about how it was everyone else who wanted women to be the same, and it was good if the communists thought that they could be free. Almost as soon as she had started to speak, she tailed off, and Joe laughed and started to tell her she was wrong, and that women wanted to be real women, not workers, but she was hardly listening. It was as though only on saying the word ‘free’ had she realised what she had been thinking all night – and not just that night, but forever, for as long as she could remember – about her home life, about her mother … yes, it was Mother who loomed in her mind, Mother’s nagging, her carping, and even, from time to time, on dark nights full of awful yells and worse silences, her sobbing. She had always resented Mother, always blamed her, but that word ‘free’ had hurt her as soon as she had tried to say it, because it was the word that Mother had spoken once, on the one occasion she had tried to speak to Laura seriously, she had told her not to give up her freedom as she had done. Freedom. What had Mother given up? As the unbidden memories crackled through Laura’s mind, she closed her eyes, the cracker she was eating an inedible lump in her mouth, and she heard Joe asking if she was going to be ill, and she made herself open her eyes and smile. That’s what you do, you stay quiet, you open your eyes, you smile. Whatever you do, you never open the door to the place where the yells and the sobbing can be heard. ‘I guess you’re right,’ she said quietly, as Joe told her that women didn’t want to have to work in the same way men did, and that communists had no idea what women really wanted. ‘Fashion, families, you know.’

‘They have fashion in the paper,’ Laura said, looking down at the newspaper that had caused the argument, and then knowing that she had been much too combative already, she smiled a dismissive little smile and asked Joe another question about what he was going to do when he got to Southampton – or Le Havre? He was happy to keep talking, and Laura found she didn’t have to speak much more, while he was so eager to air his views and experiences.

As the swell did indeed die down, and the sun appeared weakly, one of the auburn-haired girls, Maisie, joined them. She complained of a headache, but she was still breezy company, one of those people who worked hard to match each anecdote in a conversation with one of her own, so that between the two of them Laura could sit more or less in silence, her fur coat buttoned up to her chin, beginning to feel better as the wind blew over them.

‘Florence!’ she called, seeing a tall figure, her hair whipping back, walking along the deck.

‘Did I have a bad night …’ Florence said, sitting down heavily beside them.

‘Me too.’

‘The woman in my cabin was being ill all night … ugh. Listening to sounds of someone else vomiting when you’re trying to sleep … It stinks in there this morning, too.’

Laura commiserated with her, but Florence seemed less friendly than she had the day before, shrunk into herself. ‘It’s too cold to sit here, how can you stand it?’ she asked and Laura could see her shivering in her cloth coat.

‘We did the journey the other way in the summer – much better,’ Maisie said. ‘We went swimming – look at it now.’

They all looked down at the open tourist-class swimming pool, its water whipped into waves by the wind.

‘Didn’t you say that people go over to the first-class side to swim?’ Laura asked, and Joe told them again that he had heard from other passengers that there was an easy way to the indoor swimming pool through the engine room. She found herself unexpectedly intrigued by the idea, and so, clearly, did Maisie.

‘We could go,’ she said, glancing at Laura. ‘Not to swim, I suppose – just to look.’

‘Are you coming, Florence?’ Laura asked.