Rosie gathered up a pile of sheets from the floor and advanced towards him. Inside the room, inside this pocket of existence, all his senses were intensified. She paused beside him and he could smell her, feel the warmth of her breath.
‘I wanted to say good luck. I wish you the very best of luck.’
Unless he did something now, the moment would pass. Something must be said to stop her because in a second she would be past him and out of the room. There would never be another chance.
‘They told us we had to make out our wills.’ If she leaves now I’ll die, he thought. It will be a sign.
The silence was so intense that he could hear the pricking sound of the sheets as she shifted the bundle to free one hand and stretch it out towards his own. A small hand, reddened at the knuckles and joints. He took the hand, brought it to his face, breathed in its smell of coal tar soap, kissed the soft palm. She stood very still as he bent to kiss her mouth, the lids of her closed eyes, her neck, her throat. He pushed the sheets that came between them to the floor. ‘Please,’ he said.
She slid away from him and went to the window to pull the limp orange curtains together. In a sepia world she stood with her back to him, the fabric still clenched in her hands. He put his arms around her from behind and felt her heart hammering under her breast.
‘You never noticed me,’ she said.
‘I wasn’t looking. Please. I just wasn’t looking.’
Outside in the road children were shouting. Inside was the silent battle of buttons; the glass ones of her cardigan, the brass ones of his jacket, the awkward ones of his fly. He fumbled, his fingers shook. They moved across the room like drunks, shedding clothes as they went. They were on the bed by the time the armour of her corset, fastened with what seemed like a hundred hooks and eyes, came between them. He felt defeated and his face must have shown it because with trembling fingers she unhooked the first few fastenings. He took the two open ends of the corset and looked at her.
‘Go on.’
He pulled, wrenched, and the corset gave way with an explosion of little silver fastenings. She was flesh. He watched himself push inside her. From a great distance now he heard her voice, strangely high like a bird, felt her hands on his back, in his hair, as he was carried along at a terrific speed, careless of everything else except his pleasure. Alive. Every nerve was alive. Not fucking dead. Not dead not dead not dead not dead. Alive. Oh God. Alive.
In the street, a child laughed. Philip’s cheeks were wet. He felt Rosie’s hand smoothing his hair and heard her low voice: ‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’ She shifted away from him and he turned his face to the wall while she dressed. When he looked at her again she was soft blue once more, wriggling a foot down into a brown leather shoe, the wounded corset over one arm. A dove with a broken wing. She pushed her hair back and smiled shyly. ‘I’ll go down and get your things. You’ll need to hurry.’
Downstairs in the basement, she took his socks from the airer. Coarse, green socks. She smoothed them and slowly folded them into each other, her hands shaking a little, her uncle’s cable-knit cardigan hanging above her head.
Upstairs, hardly looking at her, he took the clean laundry and went on with his packing. He saw she’d gathered a little pile of silver hooks and eyes from the carpet and put them in a china saucer on the dressing table, and again felt ashamed. Then he remembered. ‘I’ve got something for you.’
The lobster had staged a recovery. They could hear it trying to make its escape even before Philip opened the bathroom door and ushered her in. He watched her face, saw the childish fright turn to amusement and then to concern.
‘Poor thing,’ she said at last. ‘Do you mind if I put it back in the sea?’
‘That’s what I wanted to do.’ They watched the lobster groping for a purchase against the slippery enamel of the bath. ‘I didn’t hurt you did I?’ She looked up at him. How small she was.
‘No.’ She put her hand up to his face. And he kissed her, a long kiss, as though they had all the time in the world. In the hall she said goodbye, told him he better go before he got court-martialled. Said she’d miss him but at least she wouldn’t have to get up so early in the mornings to cook soldiers’ breakfasts.
He looked at her, stricken. ‘Well you don’t want me to cry, do you?’ she said, smiling.
He kissed her again, shouldered his pack and left. The front door banged. She went up the stairs to the top floor, slowly, holding on to the banister. In the room she knelt by the bed for a long time, her hands clasped together, her eyes squeezed shut. Then she examined the rumpled blanket. She found it, the little bloodstain. Her lost virtue. She rocked on her haunches, hugged herself, pressing her hands against her belly.
Philip, with only five minutes left to boarding, ran all the way to the embarkation point and just made it in time to join the end of a queue of commandos disappearing into a low building on the quayside. An officer at the door took his name and directed him inside. The place was a fug of smoke. Tucker waved him over.
‘Bloody Jack Tars aren’t ready for us. Could be stuck here for two hours.’ He looked at Philip. ‘Where have you been anyway? I waited for you. Had a change of luck?’ Tucker was like that. Unexpectedly acute at times.
They were not permitted to go aboard for another three hours, but for once in his military life, Philip didn’t mind the wait. He dug out a pen and notepaper from his rucksack and wrote Rosie a letter, unaware even of Tucker’s intense curiosity boring into him all the while.
When it was finished, he asked permission to respond to a call of nature and escaped along a corridor lined with offices. In one of the rooms a Wren was typing furiously. ‘Post this for me would you?’
She looked at him, her eyes narrowing. ‘You’re one of the commandos. I can’t do that. There are no letters allowed ashore from now on.’
‘But we’re not aboard yet are we?’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘Of course it’s the point. I don’t know where I’m going yet, do I? How can I tell anybody else?’
‘It’s highly irregular,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘Please. It’s for my mother.’
Rosie was so behind. She still had the rooms to finish and hadn’t even started on cooking the evening meal, but she was determined to save the lobster from her uncle. If he found it, he’d be sure to insist on boiling it for dinner. She lifted the bundle into a bucket half-filled with water and took it down the stairs, intending to conceal it in the pantry until she had time to return it to the sea. But the funniness caught up with her. She’d pictured dancing, flowers, vows, a ring… But here she was, left all alone with a lobster in a bucket for a thank you present.
Her face in the hall mirror laughed back at her. How her eyes glittered in the dim light! ‘Bad girl,’ she mouthed the words close to her mirrored lips, caught up in the sensual memory, before self-hatred washed over her. On her back, legs in the air, a soft mat for a soldier, just like Da had said. She should drop down dead of shame on the spot; but hurrying into the kitchen she felt the tenderness inside, and rejoiced.
Rosie burned the soup, made lumpy custard and turned the rhubarb crumble into string pudding. She served it to Roger and her uncle, but would not sit down herself. She didn’t want them to look at her. While they ate, she listened through the serving hatch as her uncle passed on the news to Roger and worried about where the next billets would come from. Luckily, the soldiers had paid until the end of next week, and there were rumours the Americans would come to Cornwall. Together they chatted of a future beyond Edmund Tucker and Philip, her Philip.
The washing-up finished, Rosie left them with their two balding heads inclined towards the wireless set. It was 7.30. Blackout wasn’t until after eight, and there was still a little light. Carrying the lobster zipped up in an old leather holdall, she hurried through the murmuring clumps of people walking towards the cinemas and, cutting down a narrow passage between sagging old houses, came to the quiet of
the harbour wall. From here, a few steps down brought her on to a little pebbly beach. But when she waded a little way into the sea and unwound the netting, the lobster lay inert. Perhaps lobsters could not strike out to deep water on their own? She looked around for help.
In the fading light, a fisherman sat on an upturned boat watching her pick her way unevenly over the pebbles. ‘Can you help me, please?’ Rosie said, unwrapping the lobster a little. ‘I want to put this back in the water.’
He looked at her curiously. ‘That’s a funny request,’ he said. ‘And me just off home for me tea.’ But he dragged the boat down to the shore and held it steady while she got in.
A still shape in the prow, Rosie sat with the lobster in her lap, the net trailing into the water behind like a long tail. When they reached deep water, the fisherman shipped the oars and Rosie stood up and shook the lobster out of the net into the sea. By the light of his torch they watched it sink slowly into the green depths.
As they rowed back, the moon rose, frosting the vast shapes of ships anchored around them. Straining her ears beyond the rhythmic slip and groan of the oars, Rosie caught the clink of chains as vessels shifted slightly on their moorings, and the odd musical cries of sailors shouting and responding to orders. Where, among all these, was Philip?
Lying on his bunk in the Josephine Charlotte, Philip opened his book and found the Kirby grip marking the page, together with one of Rosie’s long dark hairs. He looked out of the porthole and longed to run back to her along the silver moon road. Someone to love. Someone to do this for. Someone to come back to.
PART TWO
Memoirs of a Child Migrant, 2006
Frankie built me a barbecue. He couldn’t understand how I’d managed without one all these years. We took the utility down to Bunnings for the bricks and mortar, calling for some food at the supermarket on the way back – because he’d also commented on the distinct lack of tucker in the fridge. I admitted I’d let things slide a bit since Jan left. ‘You’ve been drinking with the flies for too long, Alex,’ he said, lifting his bony legs to rest his sandals on the dash. ‘You need a mate.’
‘Been waiting for you,’ I said.
Coming away from the supermarket, we got held up at the red light by the new sports’ club. Even with the air conditioning, it was hotting up inside. A bunch of kids in whites were in a circle on the parched grass, a bloke in the middle throwing them catches. One little nipper took a beauty, really low down, and the bloke shouted, ‘Good on yer, Jace,’ and they all clapped.
‘Did we ever talk about dads at Dundrum?’ I asked Frankie.
He laughed. ‘Mine was “The Wolf of Kabul”.’
‘Come again?’
‘You remember that Hotspur Dan Mooney had?’
‘Yes,’ I said, though I hadn’t till that moment, when I saw so clearly in my head its red and blue cover, and the picture of the man in the flying boat.
‘Every now and then Dan got it out of his cardboard box and you read it to us. Remember? For a littlun you were dead good at reading. Anyway, there was a story in there called The Wolf of Kabul, about a British officer, working undercover. He was my dream dad, I mean the dad I thought would come and get me some day. I dreamed he’d bring his cricket bat and kill all the Brothers with it.’
‘Klicki Ba,’ I said, suddenly.
‘That was it! That’s what he called the bat. The Chinaman – what was his name?’
‘Chung!’ It came out of some lost corner of my brain.
Frankie slapped his knees, ‘Yes! “Klicki Ba cracking skulls, master.”’
We laughed and then went quiet. Cracking skulls. Too kind a death for some of them. Didn’t like to think what was going through Frankie’s head.
7
Falmouth Harbour, 15 March 1942
It was 06.00 and only just light. Most of the men were still asleep, bunched up in the bunks, hair emerging from under the blankets. If he reached out, Philip could touch the face of the next man. Two feet above him Edmund Tucker snored.
The room smelt faintly of piss and strongly of feet and it was a relief to press his face against the cold porthole and breathe in the slight draught of cold air that seeped through its rusted edge. In the moment of stillness before the machine cranked into life again, Philip squatted on his bunk and lit a cigarette, sucking on it hard and looking through the porthole at the town beyond. He could slip through that hole and swim ashore. He could. But he would not. The company of men pressed around him, bound together by a still unknown shared objective. How had they been drawn together to this rusting prison ship where they would be held until it pleased the authorities to release them?
An image from a favourite childhood storybook came to mind. He pictured elves, elves underground in the War Office, weaving a rope of the finest, softest grass, a rope of infinite length and strength. He saw the rope sent spinning into the air, so fine it was almost invisible, and dropping lightly around them. It curled around Tucker as he lugged dead pigs into his father’s butcher’s shop; around Strang whistling his collie in the fields around his Camelford farm. It hoiked Anderson out of prison; pulled Murray from the classroom. He saw himself being drawn away from his desk at the university library, moving from the silent study of wars past into the roar of war present. Now, they were all bound by this same soft cord that had fallen so innocently around their feet. It was firm about their bodies, had them tightly encircled, so close they had only to reach out to touch each other.
On the next bunk, Wilf Murray stirred and turned, his eyes for a moment locking with Philip’s. The older man was wide awake, Philip saw, realising at the same moment that many of the men could be staring at the ceiling rather than sleeping, many minds wondering if they would ever see their families again. Murray raised an eyebrow in greeting and then dug under his pillow for a small torch and a glasses case, from which he extracted a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. Balancing these on his nose and switching on the torch, his face disappeared behind a large book.
After breakfast, Tucker and Philip stood by the ship’s railings and gazed out over the harbour. More boats seemed to have arrived during the night, including a rust-streaked destroyer, the Campbeltown, and a number of small launches, which were moored close by. ‘They for us you reckon?’ said Tucker.
The launches looked flimsy and extremely inflammable. To make it worse, one had been stripped down and two men in overalls were now fixing a metal tank into place, evidently for additional fuel. ‘Yes, I think they are,’ said Philip.
Tucker belched. ‘Wooden, aren’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘That egg and bacon wasn’t enough to feed a flea.’
Tucker had a habit of introducing a train of thought and then abruptly changing direction. While I’m watching boats bursting into flames and burning men struggling in the sea, he’s back with his breakfast.
‘You’d think they’d be feeding us up wouldn’t you? What with what we’ve got to go through.’ Tucker looked wistful. ‘We got good breakfasts ashore.’
Philip jumped in. ‘Rosie did a nice fry-up, didn’t she?
‘Mmmm.’
‘Where did you say she came from?’
‘Why the sudden interest?’
‘I just thought – doesn’t she have the same accent as Clarke?’
Tucker guffawed. ‘Shows what you know about accents, Phil. You’re all the same, you private school lot. Clarke’s from Yorkshire. Rosie was from Gateshead – next to Newcastle.’
‘Why’s she down here, then?’
‘No money up there, is there? They’re all poor as mice. Said she came down because there was nothing going for her back there. Sends a bit of money home every week, you know. I suppose her uncle needed her, him being widowed and that. They help each other out more, Catholics. Thick as thieves.’
‘Very dark, isn’t she? Black hair’s quite unusual.’
‘Spanish or Italian blood, I daresay,’ Tucker said, pulling two cigarettes from a pack and handing o
ne to Philip. ‘Not that she let on.’ He cupped his hand to strike a match but the breeze quickly extinguished the flame. ‘Bugger. Passionate they’re supposed to be. Christ it makes me sick to think of the time I spent trying to get that girl into bed. I should have given it up as a bad job the moment I found out she was Catholic.’ He struck another match and inhaled sharply, bringing the tobacco to a glow. ‘There was others I could of had. That barmaid, Erica, for one.’ He blew smoke regretfully towards the shore. ‘Mind you, once you get them going, they say Catholic girls go like a rockets.’
‘Can I have a light?’
Tucker handed his cigarette to Philip. ‘You ever had a Catholic?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Real nymphos, I heard.’
‘Give it a rest, would you?’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. I’m just a bit on edge. You know.’
Tucker was understanding. ‘It’s funny how you can prattle on about everyday things and forget all about it for a while, isn’t it? And then it hits you. Might not ever find out about Catholic girls firsthand, might I? Nor you neither, unless you’ve had one already back in your secret past?’
‘Can we just drop the subject? For a bit?’
Tucker turned to the latest bit of gossip. According to Strang, the navy lads had been issued tropical kit, and Strang had it from a navy lad himself. Even showed him the kit, apparently. If the story wasn’t just a put-up job to cover the real objective, then their likely destination was Nigeria. That seemed so unreal it was a comforting idea. It was hard to imagine yourself under attack from Germans hiding behind palm trees. Tucker nodded towards the launches.
‘I’m not going to Nigeria in one of those things…’ They laughed. Philip wished it would be Africa, but was convinced it wouldn’t. The need was to keep supplies coming in from the U.S. and that meant hitting the German Navy in a European port.
The War Before Mine Page 5
