Survivor (10 page)

If Mariette had hoped to share a cabin
with a like-minded, fun-loving girl, she would have been disappointed in Stella.
Fortunately, she’d expected to be sharing it with a grumpy, elderly spinster
who moaned about everything, so Stella didn’t seem that bad.

She was lazy, slow and very unworldly,
but Mariette soon found she was the easiest person in the world to lead by the
nose.

It began with her clothes. Mariette went
through them, dug out the ones suitable for hot weather and packed the rest away.
Within two days, she’d persuaded Stella her hair was more attractive worn
loose, and, having discovered there was a hairdresser amongst the passengers, she
persuaded her to have it cut to shoulder length. It was a triumph: all at once she
looked her real age, not as if she was fast approaching middle-age.

‘Grandma said the only time a
woman could wear her hair loose was in the bedroom with her husband,’ Stella
said, looking at herself in the mirror doubtfully.

‘That went out with the sinking of
the
Titanic
,’ Mariette informed her. ‘And all your dresses are
far too long, they should be no longer than mid-calf, so we’re going to
shorten them.’

While it was quite satisfying sorting
out Stella, it didn’t actually prevent Mariette from getting homesick. It came
over her in waves when she saw another passenger hugging her child, or when they had
a meal which reminded her of home. There was an officer who looked just like her
papa from the back; each time she saw him walking along the deck, it gave her a
jolt. And at night-time, in her bunk, she missed her mother or Mog coming to tuck
her in.

As they went into
dinner on Christmas Day, Mariette felt quite smug at seeing one of the waiters smile
flirtatiously at Stella and linger a little longer than necessary as he served her
dinner. He wasn’t much to look at, in his mid thirties with thinning hair, but
it was evidence that the shortened skirt of Stella’s red velvet dress and her
new hairstyle were working.

When she’d woken that morning,
Mariette had felt really sad imagining Alexis and Noel’s excitement as they
looked in their stockings – so much so, she cried for a little while. But although
Stella was a poor substitute for her family, to see her new friend smiling and her
eyes sparkling because she’d finally got some male attention did make Mariette
feel a little less cast off and alone.

The first ten days of the voyage were
pleasant and leisurely. She liked that there was no one giving her chores to do, or
telling her off because she didn’t help around the house enough. She had
Stella for company, and although the girl was nervy and snobbish and they had little
in common, Mariette could persuade her to do whatever she wanted. They lazed around
in the sun, played quoits on deck, or card games in the saloon, talked to other
passengers. And when Mariette tired of people, she spent her time either reading or
gazing out at the vastness of the ocean.

But even for someone who liked the sea
as much as she did, it soon wore thin when day after day she was looking at the same
blue vista of sea and sky. There was the occasional school of porpoises or dolphins
to excite her, and now and then another ship in the distance, but with each day
these sightings grew less remarkable. She was bored, time passed so slowly, and she
wanted some exercise – swimming, sailing or just walking. She could, of course, walk
round and round the deck, but she thought that would drive her mad.

She also found herself becoming
irritated by many of the
passengers
because all they could do was gripe about New Zealand. Only a few of the English
people aboard were going back to visit relatives; in the main, they were returning
because they hadn’t been happy in New Zealand. Some had lost their jobs and
their money during the Depression, others found farming too hard a life, and there
were those who had emigrated thinking they’d love the wide open spaces, only
to discover they missed the crowds in English cities. It was disappointing for
Mariette to find out that so many of the passengers were dull and timid, whereas she
had fully expected them all to be bold and adventurous.

The equator was crossed with the
ceremony she’d been told about by her mother and Mog. A sailor dressed as
Neptune was doused with water and then other members of the crew acted out shaving
him with a giant shaving brush and razor. Those on board who had never crossed the
equator before, including Mariette and Stella, were dunked into a bath of water and
given a certificate of crossing the line.

It was soon after crossing the equator
that Stella and quite a few of the other passengers became seasick. Mariette
wasn’t affected by it at all, and she didn’t have much patience with
those who were. She kept telling Stella that she’d feel better on the upper
decks in the fresh air, but the girl didn’t listen and lay in her bunk getting
worse. The smell of vomit never seemed to leave the cabin – sometimes Mariette could
hardly bear it – but because Mog had said she must be kind and helpful to those who
were sick, she did begrudgingly look after Stella, washing her face and hands,
brushing her hair and emptying the sick bowl when necessary.

Stella recovered when they got to the
Panama Canal, and the novelty of passing through locks and seeing land close by
meant that Mariette was on the deck
watching all day. She couldn’t wait for the ship to reach Venezuela, where
they would be stopping at Curaçao for two days and could go ashore.

The day before they were due to arrive in
Curaçao, Mariette became ill. She was in perfect health until about an hour after
lunch, when she suddenly felt as if she was on fire, her tongue seemed to have
swollen up and a rash sprang up all over her. She felt so bad that she was glad when
Stella fetched Dr Haslem, who took her to the sickbay. She heard him telling Stella
that he thought it could be measles and she would have to stay in isolation without
any visitors.

She was glad to be in that cool room and
to be allowed to sleep. She barely noticed the next morning that the ship’s
engines had stopped, nor did she care when she heard clattering feet and excited
voices from the deck above as the passengers disembarked. She must have slept all
day because, the next thing she knew, it was dark again outside and she could hear
faint sounds of music which, she assumed, were coming from the port. During all that
time she was vaguely aware of a man with an English accent coming in and out,
getting her to drink water, giving her some medicine and putting something cool on
her forehead. But she was aware of little else.

When she opened her eyes again, there
was a shaft of sunshine coming through the porthole. It took her a moment or two to
remember why she was in the tiny white room and where it was. Gingerly, she sat up
and poured herself a glass of water from the jug beside the bed. Her tongue felt its
normal size again, she was no longer on fire, and, looking at her arms, she saw that
the rash had vanished.

She had no idea
how long she’d been in the sickbay, but as the ship wasn’t moving it
couldn’t be more than two days. She got out of bed to use the chamber pot, and
looked out of the porthole. Unfortunately, it was facing out to sea and all she
could see were some small boats, most of them like canoes, with bare-chested brown-
or black-skinned men paddling them.

She had been looking forward so much to
going ashore, and she was incensed that she’d missed the chance. She looked
down at the cotton gown she was wearing and realized her clothes had been taken
away, but when she tried to open the door to find them, she found it was locked.

While she knew this was purely to
prevent any passengers coming in and exposing themselves to infection, it still made
her feel neglected and imprisoned.

Getting back into bed to wait for
someone to come, her stomach began to rumble with hunger. After about half an hour
of listening to it, and craving at least a cup of tea, she got out of bed and began
hammering on the door and calling out.

‘Hold on, I’ll get the
key,’ a male voice called back.

‘I’m starving,’ she
shouted. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me now. I want to come
out.’

‘Alright, don’t get yourself
in a tizz,’ he retorted. ‘Get back into bed, and I’ll go and see
if I can find the doctor.’

As his accent was English, and all the
crew members she’d met until then were either New Zealanders or Italians and
other Europeans, she thought he must be the man who had been looking after her since
she was brought here.

After another interminable wait, the
door was unlocked by Dr Haslem, a scrawny little man with a big nose and horn-rimmed
spectacles. ‘Now, what’s all this fuss about?’ he asked, looking
very annoyed at being called.

‘I’m
better,’ she said, sitting up on the bed. ‘And I’m really hungry.
I want to go back to my cabin.’

The doctor closed the door and peered
first at her face, then picked up one of her arms to look at it, then the other.
‘The rash has gone,’ he said, and put a thermometer in her mouth. As he
waited for the result, he looked at both her legs and her back. Then, taking the
thermometer out of her mouth, he pronounced her temperature normal.

‘Well, you obviously don’t
have measles,’ he said. ‘It must have been a reaction to something you
ate. But I can’t let you go until you’ve eaten something, and I’ll
see how you are then.’

‘But if you know I’m not
infectious, surely I can go back to my cabin, or at least up on deck?’ she
asked. ‘And can I have my clothes back?’

Somewhat reluctantly, he agreed he would
get the steward to bring her clothes and also a meal for her. But he said she was to
stick to a light diet for the next few days, and she was not to go ashore. ‘If
you begin to feel ill again, you must come straight back here,’ he said.

Some while after the doctor had left,
the sickbay door opened and the steward came in with a tray of food. All Mariette
had been able to think of while she was waiting was food, but the sight of the
English steward made her forget how hungry she was.

His likeness to Errol Flynn, the
Hollywood actor, was incredible, with dark hair swept back from a devastatingly
handsome face, perfect white teeth and dark eyes that sparkled. As he smiled at her,
she saw there was a deep cleft in his chin.

‘Not exactly a feast,’ he
said, handing the tray to her. ‘But I was ordered to get something light.
It’s good to see you looking better; you’ve been in a bad way. I was
really worried about you.’

It wasn’t
just his looks that affected her. His voice made her think of home because his
accent was something like Mog and her mother’s, and the tone was as deep as
her father’s. Mariette glanced down at the pallid-looking omelette and the
bowl of rice pudding. If anyone else had brought it to her, she might have been
sarcastic, but coming from him it looked like the nectar of the gods.

‘It’s lovely, thank
you,’ she said, blushing because she knew he’d seen her looking her
absolute worst, and she just had to hope she hadn’t said anything stupid.
‘Aren’t you going ashore today?’

‘No, I’ve got to stay here
in case anyone else becomes sick.’

‘That’s a shame. I really
wanted to see Curaçao, I’m sure you did too.’

‘I’ve seen it before.
It’s not much to write home about. I’d only get drunk, and it can be
tough dealing with sick people after a night on the tiles.’

‘Are there any other people here
for you to look after?’

‘No, only you. Everyone else
miraculously recovered as we came into port. We were all concerned about you,
though, you were really poorly. Are you really feeling OK now?’

‘Fighting fit,’ she said.
‘Will you get my clothes, so I can go back to my cabin?’

‘I will, and you eat that food.
I’ll be back in a minute.’

Mariette noted how quiet and peaceful
the ship was as she left the sickbay. No throbbing of the engines, or passengers
milling around. Most of the crew appeared to have gone ashore too. She showered, did
her hair and changed into a blue and white striped sundress that she felt really
flattered her slender waist. It was also short enough to show off her legs, which
people had said were one of her best assets. Then she went back to the sickbay.

While she was
eating her lunch, the handsome steward had stayed with her. He told her his name was
Morgan Griffiths, he was twenty-five and had been in the Merchant Navy for six
years. He also told her he’d drawn the short straw when he was made a sickbay
steward. But he laughed as he said it, so she felt he quite liked it really.

He had also dropped into the
conversation the comment that his day would drag as there was nothing to do until
the passengers began to come back later in the afternoon. She was certain that was a
hint for her to come back.

It obviously was, because his face lit
up as she came through the door. ‘Not sick again already, I hope?’ he
said.

‘No, I thought you might like some
company.’

‘I was just going up there to sit
in the sun and have a smoke,’ he said, pointing out the narrow stairs that led
to the upper deck. ‘If anyone needs me, I can hear them from there.’

Morgan was one of the easiest people to
talk to that she’d ever met. Conversation just flowed between them about
anything and everything. He told her he wanted to leave the Merchant Navy because he
was tired of being at everyone’s beck and call. ‘You just wait till we
leave port and it turns rough across the Atlantic,’ he said with a deep sigh.
‘Seasickness will strike nearly everyone. Going back to England isn’t
usually quite as bad as coming out, because most passengers have experienced it
before, but there’re quite a few first-timers on this voyage. They all think
they’re dying, and it can be hell.’

He was vague about his background, only
mentioning that he’d spent some of his childhood in London. ‘I ought to
have become a mechanic, I’m good at that, but for some reason I got the idea
that going to sea was for me. I’d be happier in the engine room, but they made
me a steward. If I stay at it much longer, I’ll go mad. I want a real
man’s job.’

‘If war
does break out, you’ll get one,’ she said. ‘You could join the
Royal Navy.’

‘Spare me that,’ he laughed.
‘It’s bad enough being at sea for weeks waiting on people, but to be
under fire with very little chance of escape would be even worse. I wouldn’t
mind the army so much, if I could be driving trucks or tanks.’

Mariette couldn’t imagine him in a
job where he’d get mucky. He looked so right in his clean white jacket, his
hair as immaculate as if he’d just come from the barber’s. She thought
he was the perfect man – he had both charm and looks – and she loved the way he
asked her questions about her family and their life back in New Zealand with real
interest. All he’d seen of New Zealand was Auckland, but he said he’d
heard the Bay of Islands was beautiful and hoped to get there one day. He also
wanted to know what she was going to do in England, and he talked about places there
which he thought she ought to see.

‘Your father and your uncle in
England would probably want to knock my block off for suggesting this, but along
with seeing all the sights, Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London, you should
also go to the East End of London,’ he said, with that wide, lovely smile he
had. ‘It will give you a more balanced view of what England and English people
are really about. It might be squalid and grim, but it’s also vibrant and
real. We lived there for a time when I was growing up, and I learned more there than
I ever did in school. You won’t learn anything much in St John’s Wood.
It’s all about money and position there.’

There were some things about Morgan that
reminded her of her father. He had always been staunchly on the side of the
underdog, he didn’t kowtow to people just because they were rich or
influential, and he also had that keen interest in people that Morgan appeared to
share.

But she felt that,
like Papa, Morgan wasn’t a man to cross. All her life, Mariette had heard
people in Russell remarking on this fact about Etienne. They implied he could be
dangerous – in fact, Peggy often joked that in olden days he would have been a
pirate. Mariette had always been baffled by such remarks because she thought Papa to
be absolutely perfect. He was strong, protective, kind and understanding. But when
she’d heard how ferociously he’d beaten Sam and forced him to leave
Russell, she realized that this was the side of him others had always sensed.

She had grown up with boys boasting
about how tough they were, but when put to the test they usually failed. Morgan had
said nothing to imply he was tough – if anything, when he was talking about caring
for sick people, some might have thought him very soft – but she sensed he had a
harder centre. And from what little he’d said about his childhood, she guessed
it had been harsh, as her father’s had been.

Mariette knew she shouldn’t even
be thinking about any man so soon after getting her fingers burned by Sam. And yet,
sitting out on a secluded bit of deck in the hot sunshine, just talking, it seemed
like the most natural and harmless thing in the world. It wasn’t as if he was
trying to seduce her.

Their conversation ended abruptly when a
booming voice from below called out, ‘
Griffiths!
’

Morgan jumped to his feet and threw his
cigarette overboard. ‘That’s Lieutenant Hoyle. I’ve got to
go,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t come down the stairs to the sickbay.
Walk round the deck, or I’ll be in trouble for mixing with the passengers. See
you again soon.’

He kissed his index finger, and then
touched her cheek with it before disappearing down the stairs.