The next day I woke dying to explore, but found, to my horror, that I was being sent to something called the Little Neptune Club where a hatchet faced woman called Miss Hicks forced us children to play board games and do jigsaw puzzles. My mother hoped that I would make friends there, but there was no one my age, and I just desperately wanted to roam about the ship trying to get into places where I wasn’t allowed. There were bars, a casino, engine rooms, the pool and cinema to see. Instead I was sitting playing Beetle under the eagle eye of Miss Hicks, fizzing with frustration.
In the evening we shared big tables in the restaurant with other passengers and here I would hear my mother’s stories and the gasps and laughter that greeted them. I was aware that she had a couple of what she told me were ‘possibilities’ and I knew she meant for love. One was Dick, the purser, but quite soon into our trip she told another lady that she had realized that he was a ‘confirmed bachelor, if you know what I mean, nudge, nudge, wink, wink’.
The person she seemed to really like was a man called Roger, but he was married. He was the husband of a lady called Jet, who had a lot of colourful eye-catching outfits that my mother commented on; but Roger didn’t seem to get on with his wife at all. No one seemed to like Jet as she wasn’t very kind to Roger and she often got drunk. Roger seemed to like my mother a lot, and she was different around him: kinder and quieter. One night Jet got drunk and did a mean impersonation of Roger with a man who had once been rude to them at a petrol station. She thought she was being funny but no one was laughing. My mother had been trying to talk to Roger and ignore Jet, but then suddenly she turned and said, ‘Do you think you might have been a little bit squiffy at the time, Jet? Perhaps you started the quarrel and Roger was just trying to defend you?’ Everyone stared at Audrey and then started talking about something else loudly, but Jet really didn’t like my mother after that and wouldn’t sit at a table with her again. That made it hard for my mother to talk to Roger any more, but she sometimes wandered about and I knew she was looking for him, hoping that he would be on his own.
I did make friends on the cruise. One was Humphrey, an old man who was an actor, and although he looked frail he had a proper actor kind of voice, deep and booming. We met when he noticed me reading, and told me that he sat up on deck most afternoons after lunch. He offered to find me some books that I might enjoy and said he hoped we could have some more chats. Something about his kind smile reminded me of Mr Naylor, the manager at Marshall’s in Southport, and I liked him a lot.
We had sailed from Miami with our odd assortment of passengers. There were very few families and a lot of couples, a fact that my mother constantly mentioned.
Humphrey came to find me a day or two later with some books he had got for me in the ship’s library. He said he would show me where it was, and I should read some classics of both children’s and adult literature as I had the vivid imagination of a child, but the conversation of an adult. I loved The Secret Garden and Peter Pan, but also was intrigued by The Mill on the Floss and Pip’s adventures in Great Expectations. Pip’s love for Miss Havisham’s Estella reminded me of the strange cruelty that Philip seemed to almost enjoy in Of Human Bondage, as if people loved even more those who were unkind to them.
I mentioned to Humphrey about my own novel. I had begun a story about a model, Natasha, and her photographer Jason who are destined to fall in love but are continually thwarted by events and other suitors. It was called Around the World with an Air of Romance. I was pleased with the title and my idea for the story, but secretly afraid that my missing school was going to mean that I’d be no good as a writer. When Humphrey presented me with a notebook and suggested that I note things down in it – details of people and places that might one day be useful in my writing – it felt like a sign. Simply by calling me a writer he made me feel encouraged. He said everything that happened to you, good and bad, was material for your books, and this was a good way to survive things, as you didn’t mind so much if you could turn them into stories. This made me wonder about my mother, and how much of what we did was ‘material’ for her stories and whether it helped her to survive things.
I was still being sent down daily to Miss Hicks’s club, which my mother saw as her babysitter and ticket to freedom. I pleaded to be released and finally pretended to go but instead ran off to explore on my own.
The ship was an extraordinary floating world. In my notebook I wrote down descriptions and things that happened, thinking these might be material for what Natasha and Jason did on board. There were lots of bars and lounges and three restaurants of varying levels of grandeur. My mother was working in the middle one, as a hostess showing people to their tables. It had a buffet heaped with foods from different countries. The grandest one was quieter, the tables set further apart and covered with thick white tablecloths. There was a ballroom with a stage and nightly entertainments.
One day the cinema was screening a Disney comedy called That Darned Cat and I went along after lunch and saw a pretty ponytailed girl walking in with her mother and another girl who looked a bit younger. I was sitting on my own, and the mother came over and said hello.
‘This is Peter and Maxine,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you all sit together?’
The older girl, Peter, was American and gave me a ‘three is a crowd’ look, but Maxine was the same age as me, English, and friendly. She had red hair and freckles, and told me helpfully that Peter had a boy’s name because she was American.
The lights went down and That Darned Cat began as the ship rolled on towards Fiji. The film was made even funnier by Maxine’s helpless giggles. Maxine wanted to turn everything into a joke, which shattered any remaining ice between us. Peter and I became completely infected by her hysteria. We didn’t know if we were giggling at the film or at the pink helpless heap that was Maxine, but we all wept with laughter until we couldn’t breathe and our tummies hurt.
After that the three of us became inseparable. Luckily my mother decided that if I was in the company of other girls, and one was older, no harm would come to me and I was free from the horrors of Miss Hicks.
Inspired by mystery and adventure novels, which Peter and I both loved, we agreed that we three should form a gang and start looking out for adventures on board.
Maxine had another interest, similar to my own, which was ‘Lovers’, and we began to think of ways these ideas could come together … Adventures and Lovers. She had a young Irish nanny back in London who she adored, and who discussed her love affairs at length with Maxine, who now knew about French kissing, which was put in the mix with Peter’s information about WHT or ‘wandering hand trouble’, which boys had when you got older.
I was able to contribute quite a bit more technical information, as my mother had already given me some useful tips that were unusual to pass on to a girl of nine: for example that I had a magic button down below in my pussycat. Peter and Maxine received this news solemnly and didn’t mention whether or not they had found their own magic buttons yet. Between us we had a fair idea of what went on with sex. Peter regarded it with cool interest and was already conscious of her growing power over boys. Maxine of course discussed it with feverish hilarity, and I had my personal reasons for wanting to understand its complexities and how it was shaping my and my mother’s lives.
They were interested in my writing, and Maxine had the idea of using the trip for some useful research into ‘Lovers’ for my novel. There were many on board – some honeymooners, and some having wedding anniversaries – although we decided that this latter category were too old to be lovers, so should be ignored.
We took to stalking couples, and found the best time of all was on deck in the early evening with a beautiful sunset turning the sky and the water rose pink and violet. Everywhere lovers stood in pairs, leaning against the rails and gazing in rapture at the view and at each other. We saw Roger and Jet taking an evening stroll; they stopped and both looked unhappily out to sea. I had told the girls all about Roger and Jet, and poi
nted them out in the dining room. Maxine was now quite fascinated and kept staring at him, which was embarrassing.
Peter was very disapproving of my mother’s interest in Roger and said that if he and my mother became lovers it would be something called an affair, and he would have to get a divorce and everyone would hate him. I wrote this down in my notebook, and wondered if my character Jason might have a drunk wife back home and be having an ‘affair’ with Natasha. Peter’s parents knew someone who did all that and nobody talked to him any more. When she told me this, I privately thought that it wouldn’t matter, as people didn’t talk to my mother in Southport anyway, and at least she would have Roger.
One night my mother and Roger sat alone in the dining room after everyone had left. Jet had gone to bed, as my mother said, ‘a little the worse for wear’, which meant drunk. I sat with my book, looking engrossed as they talked in low voices. My mother was telling Roger about her youthful adventures, and had got to the story of ‘The Three Make Believes’. There were sometimes two versions of her tales – a happy one and a sadder one – but I could tell by her voice that this tale she was recounting to Roger was a very truthful one, so I listened with care.
The story she told to Roger began with the Make Believes and her rattling off down the highway from LA in an old school bus, which the three musicians had adapted to take them across the country.
They drove for thousands of miles, through Utah and Colorado, past cliffs of red rock and through endless sandstone desert, through pine-covered mountains with snowy peaks and mountain towns that looked like the Wild West.
They saw jazz on Basin Street in New Orleans and watched a funeral go by, and yes, she did get to the legendary Antoine’s restaurant that Louis Jourdan had told her about that night in New York, and she’d dined on oysters and snails.
They finally set off on the trip back to New York, which took them through North Carolina. As they drove across the scrubby barren landscape towards the coast, the bus navigated its way along back roads and over rickety wooden bridges to the sliver-thin barrier islands known as the Outer Banks. Nag’s Head was then an even tinier beach town, perched at the tip of the northernmost island between Kitty Hawk and the Kill Devil Hills.
The casino had been the great hangout for servicemen during the war, and was famous for having the best dance floor on the coast and a no-shoes policy. Everyone threw off their footwear at the bottom of the narrow wooden stairway before climbing to the second floor where the wooden boards gleamed in the lamplight. The owner’s secret to his legendary dance floor was bowling-alley wax, so the barefoot dancers slid and slithered across it as they jived, only pausing to take a breath by the broad windows that were propped open to let in the sea breeze. Each night the cool salty air wafted in and the music and laughter wafted out onto the beach below.
Mum (right) at the beach, USA, 1946.
That night Audrey had danced for hours, until the sun was coming up and they all ran laughing into the sea to rinse the sweat from their exhausted bodies. She was suddenly caught in the moment – the sky washed in pink, the distant shrieking of her friends along the beach, the sea foaming at her ankles – and had a fleeting sense of intense happiness. The image of James smiling down at her with his steady gaze made her feel almost weak with longing, and she couldn’t wait to go home.
Only a week or two later Audrey was looking dreamily out of the window of the bus that finally carried them all into New York. As it drove through suburbs of leafy streets, she watched mothers with babies, families meeting children off the school bus, and imagined herself in a house with James and their children playing happily in the back garden. She hugged herself with anticipation at the thought of arriving home and rushing into his arms. It had been months rather than weeks, and she had so much to tell him.
She was finally dropped off and made her way back to Sadie’s apartment in Jackson Heights. Her godmother greeted her with a big hug, but her face was grim and Audrey knew immediately that something was wrong. Sadie handed her the stack of envelopes: letters from her mother, from Jean and from James. Some had been forwarded by Miss Gillette’s secretary to New Orleans, where a landlady had then forwarded them on up to New York. The letters looked battered and exhausted from their long journey and were now grubby with stamps and forwarding labels as she tore them open.
She began with the earliest date and her mother’s first letters telling her how loyal James had been in coming to visit her, bringing her flowers, and looking lovingly through her albums of pictures of Audrey.
The letters from James told a similar story. The early ones were sweet, eager and loving, and full of interest at her amazing adventures. But the later ones sounded hurt and concerned, and he asked her repeatedly for a return date. The last one said that, as she hadn’t responded with a date, he was now assuming that her feelings for him had changed.
Rebecca’s letters then delivered the alarming news that Janet, a girl who had been evacuated from Coventry and stayed on in Southport, was spending more time with him. James had begun playing tennis with Janet most days, and meeting up with their friends at the pub on summer evenings.
Audrey sat, white-faced and uncomprehending, as Sadie then read out her own letter from Rebecca.
I can hardly bear to think how my darling will feel, but James and Janet announced their engagement last Saturday. He had been round to see me and told me that his last letter to Audrey had never had a reply. I asked him to please wait, but he said his mind was made up, and that all his friends and family agreed that it was all for the best. He said that he and Janet wanted the same things: children and a quiet family life. They didn’t see any reason for a long engagement and were arranging the wedding for that same summer.
Audrey took the next berth she could get on the Queen Mary home. It was a very different journey from the one she had taken a few months before and she spent those days in silent shock. She then caught the first train she could from Southampton up to Southport. Her mother tried to stop her, but she just left her bags and went straight to James’s parents’ house.
James’s father opened the door and called for James, who appeared, looking defensive. They left the house and walked together through the pinewoods along the beach near his home. She wept, pleaded, apologized, made excuses, pleaded again. He was cold and withdrawn. She tried to put her arms around him, to bury her face in his neck and smell that familiar smell.
‘Don’t,’ he said angrily.
She felt as though something in him had broken.
‘I’d believed that there was this strong thread between us,’ she told Roger that night on the cruise ship, as I eavesdropped. ‘It was stronger than thousands of miles, or an ocean; it would have gone around the world several times and not snapped. I felt it, I felt it all the time I was away, every moment of every day.’
But James didn’t believe this, and he was so different that she hardly recognized him. He told her, ‘It was only after a month or two that I realized you never even talked about wanting children or running a home. All those letters from America were about meeting “fascinating people” and seeing the world. You seemed to be always chasing some dream, and I realized that you always would be.’
He began to walk back towards his house very fast. In her skirt and heels she couldn’t match his long strides and as she called after him her voice was soon lost in the wind whistling through the pines.
Their break-up was something that she believed was her lifelong wound – and it would never fully heal. This was the account she now quietly told to Roger, and it explained so much of what happened later.
When I finally asked her, some years after this, what was her third wish, she looked at me quizzically.
‘On the Queen for a Day recording, remember they gave you three wishes.’
‘Oh,’ she said wistfully. ‘I said that I wished to go home to my handsome prince, my fiancé, and live happily ever after.’
I then asked her why she had cried at the Nag
’s Head Casino, and after a moment she said, ‘I suppose because that was the last time I was truly happy.’
At last the missing pieces were beginning to fit together. There were gaps, a time that I had heard her describe as her ‘London years’, but nothing that explained what was for me the most interesting part of the story, which was how I came to be born.
13
I Yabba Dabba Doo!
ONE OF THE MAJOR EVENTS of the cruise’s crossing was the fancy-dress gala, and I was secretly hoping that my mother and I would be the best costumes. I knew this would cheer her up and give Roger a chance to see her shine. My actor friend, Humphrey, was going as ‘Prospero’ from a Shakespeare play, and gave me a book of Shakespeare’s stories written for children. He said that if I could tell him who Prospero was by the night of the fancy-dress gala he would make me a gift of the shell necklace which I kept looking at in the shop. I found the character in The Tempest, read the story, and won my necklace. He told me that he had once played Prospero, and that the costume only required the rags of a shipwreck survivor, a tall staff and a cape, which suggests magic and sorcery.
He had brought a bedsheet, which we took down to the games room and spread on the floor. Maxine and Peter helped me, and we decorated it with felt pens, drawing moons, stars and magical symbols copied from Humphrey’s book, to create a sorcerer’s cape for him to wrap around himself.
As we finished the cape Humphrey circled us, saying in his marvellous booming voice:
Diamonds at the Lost and Found Page 10
