Page 81 of The Ship of Brides
Frances looked back at the envelope, checked that she’d read the name correctly. Then she turned to Margaret, perplexed. Behind her, voices were raised in shock at some misdemeanour in the ring, but she kept her eyes on the woman beside her.
‘I lied,’ said Margaret. ‘I let you think she was dead but she’s not. She left us. She’s been gone nearly two and a half years.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Yup.’ She waved the letter. ‘I don’t know why I brought it up here.’
Then Margaret began to talk, at first quietly, and then as if she no longer cared who heard.
It had been a shock. That much was an understatement. They had come home one day to find dinner bubbling on the stove, the shirts neatly pressed over the range, the floors mopped and polished and a note. She couldn’t take it any more, she had written. She had waited until Margaret’s brothers were home from the war, and Daniel had hit fourteen and become a man, and now she considered her job done. She loved them all, but she had to claw back a little bit of life for herself, while she still had some left. She hoped they would understand, but she expected they wouldn’t.
She had got Fred Bridgeman to pick her up and drop her at the station, and she had gone, taking with her only a suitcase of clothes, forty-two dollars in savings, and two of the good photographs of the children from the front parlour.
‘Mr Leader at the ticket office said she’d got the train to Sydney. From there she could have gone anywhere. We figured she’d come back when she was ready. But she never did. Daniel took it hardest.’
Frances took Margaret’s hand.
‘Afterwards, I suppose, we could all have seen the signs. But you don’t look, do you? Mothers are meant to be exhausted, fed up. They’re meant to shout a lot and then apologise. They’re meant to get headaches. I suppose we all thought she was part of the furniture.’
‘Did you ever hear from her?’
‘She wrote a few times, and Dad wrote begging her to come back, but when she didn’t, he stopped. Pretty quickly, come to think of it. He couldn’t cope with the idea of her not loving him any more. Once they accepted she wasn’t coming back, the boys wouldn’t write at all. So... he just... they... behaved as if she had died. It was easier than admitting the truth.’ She paused. ‘She’s only written once this year. Maybe I’m a reminder of something she wants to forget, guilt she doesn’t want to feel. Sometimes I think the kindest thing I could do would be to let her go.’ She turned the envelope in her free hand.
‘I’m sure she wouldn’t want to cause you pain,’ said Frances, quietly.
‘But she is. All the time.’
‘You can get in touch with her, though. I mean, once she hears where you are, who knows? She might write more often.’
‘It’s not the letters.’ Margaret threw the envelope on to the deck.
Frances fought the urge to pin it down with something. She didn’t want a stray breeze to take it overboard.
‘It’s everything. It’s her – her and me.’
‘But she said she loved you—’
‘You don’t get it. I’m her daughter, right?’
‘Yes... but—’
‘So what am I meant to feel, if motherhood is so bad that my mum had always been desperate to run away?’ She rubbed swollen fingers across her eyes. ‘What if, Frances, what if when this thing is born, what if when this baby finally gets here... I feel exactly the same?’
The weather had broken at almost four thirty, just as the boxing finished – or as Tims grew bored: it was hard to say which. The first large drops of rain landed heavily on the deck, and the women had swiftly disappeared, exclaiming from under sunhats or folded magazines, sweeping their belongings into bags and scurrying, like ants, below decks.
Margaret had retreated to the cabin to check on the dog, and Frances sat with Jean in the deck canteen, watching the rain trickling through the salt on the windows and into the rusting frames. Only a few brides had chosen to stay on deck, even under the relative shelter of the canteen: a storm on the sea was a different prospect from one on land. Faced with 360-degree visibility and nothing between human life and the endless expanse of rolling grey seas, with the thunderous clouds coming relentlessly from the south, it was possible to feel too exposed.
Margaret had seemed a little better once she’d spoken out. She had wept a little, crossly blamed the baby for it, and then, smiling, had apologised, several times. Frances had felt helpless. She had wanted to tell her a little about her own family, but felt that to do so would require further explanation, which she wasn’t prepared to give, even to Margaret. The other woman’s friendship had become valuable to her, which made her vulnerable. Also, it brought with it a sense of foreboding. She toyed with the metal spoon in her empty cup, hearing the ship groan, the sheets of metal straining against each other like fault lines before an earthquake. Outside the lashings clanked disconsolately, and the rain ran in tidal rivers off the deck.
Where is he now? she thought. Is he sleeping? Dreaming of his children? His wife? Just as Margaret’s friendship had introduced new emotions into her life, so thoughts of the marine’s family now brought out something in her that filled her with shame.
She was jealous. She had felt it first on the night that Margaret had spoken to Joe on the radio; hearing their exchange, seeing the way Margaret had been illuminated by the mere prospect of a few words, made Frances aware of a huge chasm in her own life. She had felt a sadness that wasn’t, for once, assuaged by the sight of the ocean. Now, a sense of loss was sharpened by the thought of the marine and his family. She had thought of him as a friend, a kindred spirit. It was as much as she had ever expected of a man. Now she found it had crossed into something she couldn’t identify, some nagging impression of separation.
She thought of her husband, ‘Chalkie’ Mackenzie. What she had felt on first meeting him had been quite different. She put down the spoon and forced herself to look at the other women. I won’t do this, she told herself. There is no point in hankering for things you can’t have. That you have never been able to have. She made herself think back to the beginning of the voyage, to a time when the mere fact of the journey was enough. She had been satisfied then, hadn’t she?
‘The cook says it’s not going to be a bad one,’ said Jean, returning to the table with two cups of tea. She sounded almost disappointed. ‘This is about as rough as it’s going to get, apparently. Shame. I didn’t mind all that rocking when we came through the Bight. Once I stopped chucking my guts up, anyway. Still, he says we’ll probably get more bad weather once we get the other side of the Suez Canal.’
Frances was getting used to Jean’s perverse enthusiasms. ‘There can’t be too many other passengers praying for rough weather.’
