The Little Ship

by Margaret Mayhew

  A sister? How could she ever be that? A foreigner who didn’t even speak English? Lizzie was used to being an only child. A special child because she had been adopted, she had always been told: specially chosen. ‘Why don’t her parents leave Austria as well, if it’s so horrid there for them? Couldn’t they all go and live somewhere else together?’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that. You can’t just go and live and work in other countries without permission. But Anna will be allowed to come to school here. Of course, they will miss her very much. It’s a great sacrifice on their part.’

  It is for me, too, Lizzie thought. I don’t want a stranger here all the time. Not one bit.

  ‘Does she have to come and live with us?’

  ‘We promised that we would take care of her. Her parents are very worried.’

  ‘I don’t understand why people would want to harm them – just because they’re Jewish. What’s wrong with them?’

  ‘Nothing is wrong with them. I don’t understand, either, Lizzie, but some people in other countries – wicked people – try to make out that there is. Daddy and I felt that we should help the Steins. We’re very lucky to live in a country like England, you know. Very lucky indeed.’

  She couldn’t see what that had to do with it. All she could see was that everything was going to change and that it would probably never ever be the same again.

  ‘Oh, Anna, how terrible!’ Mina was staring at her, appalled. ‘England! But why?’

  ‘Mama and Papa don’t think it’s safe for Jews here any more. And the other night some soldiers threw stones up at the Fischers’ window opposite us and broke it, so they’re really panicking now.’

  ‘Stones! How dreadful!’

  ‘The soldiers were probably drunk, that’s all.’

  ‘My parents don’t seem to worry.’

  ‘Lucky you, Mina. They won’t try to send you away. I’ve told mine I refuse to go.’

  ‘They’ll make you. You’ll have to do what they say.’

  ‘Then they’ll have to carry me onto the train.’

  ‘Oh, Anna … Do you remember in French class when Mademoiselle Deuchars said that the English were barbarians? Ils sont barbares. She said they were dirty and drunken and behaved like savages. Whatever will you do?’

  ‘Not go.’

  ‘You’ll have to.’ Mina’s face was tragic now. ‘And I’ll miss you so much, Anna. I won’t have a single friend at school. You know how all the other girls despise us. I’ll be so miserable.’

  ‘I told you,’ Anna said fiercely. ‘I’m not going.’

  Matt unhitched Bean Goose’s painter and shoved her bow sideways away from the jetty so that she came round at right angles to the wind. He settled himself with his wonky hand on the tiller and grasped the mainsheet with his good hand. As he was on his own, he hadn’t put the jib up. He let the mainsail out and kept his course steady, steering for a distant marker upstream on the far bank – a tall tree. He was doing everything pretty well right so far. If Guy had been here he’d probably have told him he wasn’t, but Guy was on his way to the dentist in London with Mother to have his front tooth mended so, for once, he was out on his own. It didn’t happen often – not that that was Guy’s fault. He could take the dinghy out alone any time he wanted, but the truth was that he had to screw up the nerve to do it. He didn’t sail nearly as well as Guy. Guy knew by instinct what to do, whereas he often got it wrong. On his own, he always went upstream because it was much easier. It was OK pootling along up there and going round the creeks, but downstream, where the river became hugely wide and the great mass of water surged out to the North Sea, scared him. He’d never admitted it to a soul – least of all to Guy who was never afraid of anything – but he hated the sea. There was nothing kind about it, he thought. The sea was out to get you if it could and drown you in its freezing depths. The mighty ocean deep. The very words gave him the shivers. When he’d been learning to swim in the prep-school swimming-baths he’d almost drowned. The instructor’s idea of teaching had been to make you jump straight into the deep end when he blew a whistle. Swim or sink, boys. You’ll soon get the hang of it. Quickest way to learn. He’d sunk all right – gone down like a stone to the bottom and as soon as he’d come up he’d gone down again. And then up and down again. With only one good hand he couldn’t do proper strokes and with all the splashing and kicking from the others going on around him, nobody had noticed until it had almost been too late. He could never forget the terror of it: the frantic struggle to breathe, the way he’d clawed and fought and kicked. Then someone had grabbed hold of him and they’d hauled him out, choking and spluttering. The instructor had been furious with him. Stupid boy. You should have stayed near the side. He’d learned to swim soon after that – found a way to use his right arm that worked pretty well, though he wasn’t as fast as most of them.

  He sailed on steadily, keeping the dinghy’s bow in line with his tree marker on the bank. The sun had gone in and some dark clouds were gathering. Bean Goose heeled as the wind freshened but he counterbalanced it all right by moving towards the windward side and easing the mainsheet. As he drew near to his tree he went about, pushing the tiller away from him so that the bow swung through the wind. The sail flapped loudly above his head and then filled again on the other side. He brought the tiller back to the centre and settled Bean Goose on her new course, sailing to windward. He hauled in the mainsheet, flattening the sails, and began beating steadily towards the mouth of the river. And the open sea.

  Guy sat in the dentist’s chair, mouth open, wishing the fellow would get a move on and finish the job. He’d been fiddling about for ages. The whole thing was a bore and Mother had made a big fuss over it. Chaps were always getting teeth broken and chipped at school, or knocked out completely. It was usually a cricket ball, or playing rugger, or bashing up against the side of the swimming-baths, or going over bike handlebars like he’d done. If he hadn’t turned quite so sharply and been going a bit slower, he’d have made that corner OK.

  ‘Open a little wider, please.’

  He stretched his aching jaw further and stared at the ceiling and the eighteen plaster rosettes along the edge – he’d been counting them on every visit since he was five. The third from the end on the right had a big chip out of it, like his tooth. Or like his tooth had been before old Payne had got to work on it. Rather a joke a dentist having a name like that; people must pull his leg about it no end.

  ‘You may close now. All done.’

  Mr P. was washing his hands fussily at the basin in the corner and then drying them on a towel. It amused Guy that he was much taller than the dentist now. He’d looked up to him on every visit for years and years until one summer hols when he’d walked into the room for his appointment and found he was looking down instead.

  ‘Don’t bite on it for a few hours. And try not to knock it again, if you can help it. If you’re careful it should last for years.’

  In the waiting-room his mother was sunk in the corner of a sofa, reading The Illustrated London News. ‘Let me see, darling? Heavens, that looks wonderful. You’d never know.’

  He glanced in the mirror over the fireplace, baring his teeth. Behind him some rather glamorous woman in a red dress was watching him over her Tatler. He caught her eye and she smiled. He smiled back before he looked away from the mirror. ‘Good as new. Can we go and have some lunch? I’m famished.’ Striding down Harley Street towards Wigmore Street beside his mother, he found himself playing bears and stepping over pavement lines like he and Matt used to do. At the Orange Tree restaurant, where they always went after the dentist, he forgot about not biting on the front tooth but it didn’t seem to matter anyway as the fried plaice didn’t need much chewing, nor did the vanilla ice-cream. His mother looked at her wrist-watch.

  ‘We’ve got more than two hours before the next train. I’d like to go and see Aunt Helen, darling, if you don’t mind.’

  That was OK by him. Wimpole Street was only round the corner a
nd Mother’s sister was pretty decent. She fussed much less than Mother so she wouldn’t make a drama over the tooth. The house was actually rather grand. Uncle Richard’s consulting-room and his secretary’s office were on the ground floor but the rest of it was a normal home. The manservant, Hodges, opened the door and Aunt Helen appeared, all smiles. Cousin Lizzie, hovered in the background like a timid little mouse. His aunt drew her forward.

  ‘Do show Guy your paintings, Lizzie. He’d like to see them, wouldn’t you, Guy?’

  He wouldn’t in the least, but he agreed graciously, seeing that his mother and aunt obviously wanted to have one of their sisterly chin-wags. There was a time limit for catching the train so it was no great sacrifice. He followed his cousin up three floors and then on up a steep and narrow flight of uncarpeted stairs to the very top of the house. Lizzie opened a door and beckoned him in. The attic room was surprisingly light and spacious and there was even a small fireplace. The only furniture was a wooden table and a couple of old kitchen chairs. He could see an open box of water-colour paints on the table, beside a pad and a jamjar full of cloudy water. Another jamjar held brushes. He said teasingly, ‘Is this your artist’s studio, then, Lizzie?’ She went pink in the face, like the time he’d caught her without her knickers. ‘It isn’t really a studio. I just pretend it is. The maid sleeps in the other room up here but this one was empty so Mummy said I could use it.’

  ‘It’s jolly nice.’ He went to the open window where there was a cooling breeze and looked out over the parapet and across the rooftops of London. There were hundreds of chimney-pots. Rows and rows of them, all shapes and sizes, sticking up jauntily as far as the eye could see. ‘I like your view.’

  ‘It should be north,’ she said solemnly. ‘But it’s east, so the light’s not really right for painting.’

  That tickled him even more but he didn’t show it. ‘Well, come on, let’s see these pictures of yours.’

  ‘You don’t have to look at them – not if you don’t want to.’

  He realized that she was just as reluctant to show them as he was to see them. ‘May as well, Lizzie, now we’ve come all the way up here.’

  She edged aside so that he could see the water-colour of a sailing-dinghy with two figures on board. He looked at it in surprise. He’d expected infantile pictures – toytown houses, cotton-wool clouds, yellow suns with rays like bicycle spokes … all that sort of stuff – but she’d got the water and the sky rather well and the boat wasn’t bad either. ‘Is this meant to be Bean Goose?’ She nodded. ‘I don’t think I’ve got it quite right. I couldn’t remember exactly.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got the sail wrong – it’s too small – and you’ve forgotten the standing rigging for the mast. Otherwise it’s OK. Is that Matt and I?’ She nodded again. ‘Why aren’t you there, too? You came with us.’

  ‘I never do myself. I don’t really know what I look like.’

  He tweaked one of her plaits. ‘You should look in the mirror and do a self-portrait. All the great artists did that. Rembrandt and van Gogh, and all that lot. Where’re the others you’ve done, then?’

  ‘There’s some underneath.’

  He picked up the pad and flicked over the pages. The more he turned, the more it dawned on him that Lizzie was actually rather good. The subjects were quite grown-up – the view over the rooftops, some fruit in a bowl, a likeness of his aunt sitting in a chair … ‘I say, these really aren’t bad, Lizzie.’

  ‘Oh …’ She stared at him, her blue eyes round as marbles. ‘Do you really think so? Honestly, Guy?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Honestly.’ He turned more pages. ‘I think they’re jolly good. Are you going to be a real artist when you grow up?’

  ‘Gosh, no, I shouldn’t think so. You have to be brilliant.’

  ‘If you carry on like this, you might turn out to be. Perhaps you inherited it from your other mother and father.’ It was OK to say that, he reckoned, because everyone knew she was adopted, and she knew that they knew. Uncle Richard and Aunt Helen thought it was better. Maybe Lizzie’s real parents had both been artists and pretty casual about how they lived, which explained how they’d come to have Lizzie and then given her away. Rather intriguing. He put the pad down on the table. ‘It must be nice having this room up here all to yourself. You can pretend as much as you like when you’re alone.’

  She pulled a face. ‘I won’t be alone much longer. There’s somebody coming to live with us in September. I expect she’ll want to come up here as well.’

  He wasn’t very interested. ‘Oh, who’s that?’

  ‘Some girl. Mummy and Daddy met her parents in Vienna. She’s Jewish. That’s why she’s got to come and live here. Mummy says they hate them there.’

  ‘Sounds a bit rum. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know really.’

  He said carelessly, ‘Actually, I’ve never met anybody Jewish. Can’t say I know much about them – except that they don’t believe in Jesus Christ. Perhaps that’s the problem – why some people don’t like them.’ He glanced at his wrist-watch. ‘Time Mother and I got a taxi or we’ll miss the train.’ On the way downstairs he said over his shoulder, ‘What’s her name, this Jewish girl?’

  ‘Anna. Anna Stein.’

  ‘Well, bad luck about it, anyway.’

  They caught the train from Liverpool Street station with only a minute to spare. Guy watched the sooty buildings and the slum backyards sliding past and wondered how people could live in such hideous places. The carriage was full and two old women nattered non-stop to each other most of the way. To make matters worse, his tooth had started aching. By the time they arrived at Burnham station he was in a foul mood, not improved by the fact that it was pouring with rain and the soft top of the Alvis leaked like a sieve. ‘You ought to get it repaired, Mother.’

  ‘I know, darling, but it would cost such a lot. It will have to wait.’

  He never thought much about money unless the lack of it prevented him from having something he really wanted – like a bigger and better boat or a decent bike. Father didn’t get paid a fortune in the Navy, he knew, but he had shares, or something, and Mother had some money of her own, so things were fairly comfortable. There just wasn’t enough to splash it around. When he’d finished with school and university he was going to make sure he earned enough to own three things: a thirty-foot sailing-yacht, a sports car and an aeroplane.

  When they reached home he went up to the bathroom and hunted for some aspirin in the cabinet. He took two tablets and went into Matt’s room, expecting to find him with his nose in a book, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t downstairs either and as it was raining cats and dogs he wouldn’t be outside in the garden. Maybe he’d gone off somewhere on his bike and was sheltering. Nereus was lying on the rug in the hall. ‘Where is he, Nereus? Where’s Matt?’ The Labrador lifted his head and thumped his tail and then lowered his head on his paws again. ‘Not telling, eh? Useless dog.’

  He stuck his head round the kitchen door. The cook was peering at something in the oven. ‘Seen Matt anywhere, Mrs Woodgate?’ She straightened up creakily, her moon face shiny red from the heat. ‘Not all afternoon, Master Guy. He’s not been in here – not like he usually does when I’ve been baking.’

  ‘What’s for supper?’

  ‘Fish pie. And there’s no call for you to make that face. It’s good fresh cod, caught today. I’ve made a treacle tart for pudding. And I’ve baked some of those almond biscuits you like.’

  ‘Can I have one now?’

  She huffed and puffed but she gave him one. She always did. He went off, munching the biscuit, wandered into the drawing-room and stood at the French windows. The rain was worse than ever, the wind gusting hard and whipping up the river’s surface. From the look of the sky there was plenty more bad weather to come, which would put the kibosh on any sailing tomorrow. Still, he could do some more work on the Fokker D-7 – finish off the fuselage so he could start putting the whole thing together and get the Hun markings on. He looked
at his wrist-watch. Where the hell was Matt? Where on earth would the idiot have gone? He was still eating the biscuit and watching the rain and the river when he suddenly guessed what his brother had done.

  Matt knew that he was going to drown. He had been swimming and floating alternately for what seemed like hours and all he could see around him were waves – grey-green waves with white crests, rising and falling in endless motion. He rose and fell with them and every so often one would break over his head. He knew the waves were playing a game – taunting and teasing him, biding their time. When Bean Goose had capsized she’d reared up suddenly like a horse and the next thing he’d known he was in the water, caught under her hull. He’d seen the dark shape of the dinghy above him and her mast pointing downwards towards the bottom and felt ropes dangling all round him. When he’d dived down to get clear of the hull he’d come up under the sail which was spread wide over the surface. His life-jacket had forced him hard up against the canvas so that he’d been trapped. It was the choking nightmare of the school swimming-baths all over again, only this time it had been even more terrible because there was nobody near who could help him. He’d tried diving down again and got tangled up with some rope. Somehow he’d managed to free himself and to dive down yet again to try and get clear of the sail. Once more he’d come up still trapped underneath it but on the third try, lungs bursting and with the last of his strength, he’d swum deeper and further and shot up to the surface and to air. The first breath had been agony. His lungs hadn’t worked properly and he’d had to made a great effort to go on breathing. For a long while he’d been too weak to do anything but breathe and float. His limbs had terrible pins and needles and were useless. Eventually, he had started swimming – slow, feeble strokes. Bean Goose was only a few yards away, bobbing along upside down, but the force of the tide was carrying her from him much faster than he could swim. And even if he could have reached her, he knew he’d never have been able to right her on his own. All he could have done was cling on and probably be carried further and further out to sea. Better to try and swim in the direction of the land. He’d set off and soon discovered that he was making no headway against the tide. He floated again for a while, dazed with shock and cold and fear. He’d been a complete fool and this was all his own fault. He’d seen the bad weather coming, felt the wind’s strength increasing, and yet instead of turning back to safety he’d gone on doggedly, driven by the stupid idea of overcoming his fear of the open sea and of proving that he could sail Bean Goose as well as Guy. Guy would never have got himself into a mess like this. When things had got hairy and Bean Goose had started to heel over he’d have eased the mainsheet and shifted his weight to windward. That’s what he should have done himself – only his brain had turned to jelly and he’d sat there like a fool, clinging on to the mainsheet for dear life, legs braced hard against the steepening tilt, until, of course, she’d gone over.