A Quiet Life(14)

But when Joe turned to Laura and started to ask her about whether she was going back into first class, his energy moved easily away from Lily and towards her, and she realised that there was no particular intimacy between him and Lily. He was just one of those people who wanted to create a flirtatious warmth with everyone he met. It was unusual in a man, Laura thought as she answered him, to see this constant attentiveness to every person. No wonder he had collected this little group around him in the few days on the boat.

And so she stood quite happily, chatting with the others, until she saw Florence again, now in conversation with a steward on the other side of the deck, and moved away to join her. The steward was, to Laura’s mind, a rather unprepossessing man, a short dark boy with a bad squint. Florence and he had spoken briefly to one another before, Laura had noticed, and now with a transparent pretence of asking for coffee, Florence was talking to him again. As Laura walked up to them, she heard the words ‘conditions’, ‘hours’ and ‘wages’ and knew that Florence was becoming exercised about some injustice that the boy was telling her about. She should have been pleased, she knew, that this was what Florence was doing, but instead she felt irritated that Florence’s attention had shifted away from her, and was not sorry when the boy moved off as she approached.

In the evening a band was playing in the tourist-class restaurant, and after eating their steaks and apple tart Florence and Laura sat watching a few couples on the little dance floor. Florence was talking when Joe stopped at their table to ask her if she wanted to dance, and she shook her head. He raised his eyebrows at Laura, and she bit her lip. ‘I can’t dance like that,’ she said, motioning to where Maisie and Lily were dancing with a couple of men. They were fast and slick, turning and turning on neat lines.

‘Who cares?’ Joe said, catching her hand, and on an impulse Laura stood up. He was not a great dancer either, and Laura felt that they were the clumsiest people moving in the room. There was something so exposed about dancing while people were dining, looking up from their plates to watch you turn and step. At one point she looked back at their table and saw that Florence was no longer there, and she loosed her hand from Joe’s. ‘I must just find Florence—’ and then turned to smile at him politely, ‘but thank you.’

She walked up the stairs to the deck, and sure enough there was Florence, her voice was clear in the night air. ‘I think that you should be standing up to them,’ she said. She was talking to the steward again. ‘If they are really trying to bring down your wages because of that, well—’

‘Florence!’

Florence waved to her, but turned back to the steward. Their voices were lowered as Laura walked towards them, but she heard Florence tell the man something about someone he needed to talk to in New York. As Laura came to stand next to them, she told them not to mind her, but the man looked at her with some embarrassment and then moved off.

‘Was I interrupting?’ She heard how her voice sounded, reedy and uncertain. Florence shrugged. They stood at the rails, but the urgency of their conversations over the last few days seemed to have left them. As they stood there, the music from the swing band downstairs was heard through an open door, spilling out onto the deck and the ocean. Laura felt its rhythms again, and remembered the touch of Joe’s hand and his clumsy energy as they danced.

‘There will be so much to do when we’re in London,’ Florence said, and Laura realised all of a sudden how near her aunt’s house was. Her aunt, and the cousins, Winifred and Giles, who had sounded so formal in the letters they had written, were waiting for her in that grey city, ready to take her back into the embrace of family life. Florence, she knew, was thinking of a different London, a city that she thought was readying itself for war, a city where she thought she could be useful. They talked idly for a while about when the boat was likely to get to Southampton the next day, and then Florence said that she thought she would go back to the cabin and finish her book. ‘Damn, I left my scarf in the restaurant,’ she said.

‘I left my handkerchief too,’ Laura said, although she knew perfectly well that her handkerchief was in the pocket of her coat, back in their cabin, ‘I’ll go.’ She left Florence on the dark windy deck and went back down. Through the doors to the restaurant, it was all warmth and light. A number of couples were dancing now, but in the centre of them were Maisie and Lily dancing together, moving even more sharply than when they’d danced with the men, the fastest rumba Laura could imagine. The music seemed to be shaking off their bodies as they tripped backwards and forwards.

‘They’re not bad,’ said Joe, suddenly at her elbow. ‘You rushed off …’

Laura apologised. ‘I had to find Florence.’ She saw Florence’s scarf on the back of a chair, but rather than moving over to pick it up, she turned back to Joe. ‘Dance again?’ she said. This time they moved together with more ease, and as the number ended Laura could feel the sweat springing up under her arms. ‘I must take Florence her scarf,’ she said, but she said so looking at Joe, and this time they went together out of the restaurant. Upstairs, however, the deck was empty. Instead of moving back downstairs to look for Florence, Laura paused.

‘Smoke?’ Joe’s voice was very near to her ear.

She took one although she hardly wanted it, the freshness of the salt air was so keen. As he lit it, Joe looked into her face, and Laura felt that their bodies were even closer than they had been when they were dancing.