Survivor (15 page)

‘Of course I do,’ said Rose,
slipping her arm around Mariette’s waist. ‘You are nineteen now, quite
old enough to be
shown off, and I want
to see if you remember all the dances I’ve taught you.’

‘You look an absolute
picture!’ Noah exclaimed, when Mariette came into the sitting room with Rose
an hour later.

Mariette blushed. She adored the cream
lace dress; it had a silky underdress with shoestring straps and a low neckline, but
the overdress had elbow-length sleeves and a higher neck, which resulted in a
peek-a-boo effect with enough flesh showing through for glamour, but not enough to
look common. The skirt was cut on the cross, so it clung to her hips and then flared
out in handkerchief points that reached to mid-calf.

‘Perfect!’ Lisette clapped
her hands in approval. ‘I always envied Belle having Mog to make her clothes;
she is such a marvellous dressmaker.’ She took the new fluffy stole from
Mariette’s hands and arranged it around her shoulders. ‘So chic and
beautiful.’

‘You don’t think I ought to
have put my hair up?’ Mariette asked. She had wanted to put it into a roll – a
popular style amongst Rose’s friends – but her hair was too curly to stay in
place, so she’d clipped it up on either side of her face with two little
slides.

‘It would be criminal to hide that
pretty hair,’ Noah said stoutly. ‘In my opinion, all women should have
flowing locks until they are at least thirty.’

Lisette laughed. ‘He would still
have me wearing mine loose and grey, if he had his way. But he is right about you,
Mari, your hair is too pretty to put up.’

‘And you look beautiful
too,’ Noah said to Rose. ‘I always like you in that dress.’

Rose was wearing a dropped-waist pale
pink crêpe de Chine dress with panels of slightly darker pink embroidery.
Mariette thought it a little
old-fashioned, but it suited Rose as she was rather flat-chested. Her satin shoes
had been dyed to match her dress, and she had a pink flower in her hair.

The doorbell rang.

‘That will be Peter,’ Rose
said. ‘Come on, Mari, it’s time for dancing.’

‘Have a lovely evening,’
Lisette said. ‘But remember, not too late coming home.’

Mariette had heard Rose talk about Soho
a great deal; her eyes lit up when she mentioned it. She said it was where all the
fun people went for a daring night out, and the Bag O’Nails, where they were
to celebrate Mariette’s birthday, was right at the centre of it.

The club was dark and smoky, and full to
capacity. A five-piece band of black musicians were playing jazz, that wild music
she’d heard before in Curaçao. As they squeezed through to a table reserved
for them, Mariette could see by all the shining, rapt faces around her that she
wasn’t alone in liking the music.

The dance floor was packed with
energetic dancers, and it was a startlingly different scene to anything she’d
imagined. Up until now, all the English people she’d met seemed very sedate,
and so she expected people to be waltzing, or doing the quickstep, not throwing each
other around as they were doing here. But the music made her want to lose all her
inhibitions and dance like that too.

Gerald was waiting for them at the
table. As he got up to be introduced to her by Peter, she knew immediately that he
would never be able to make her heart race, however ‘suitable’ he might
be as a boyfriend.

He was tall, slender and wore his dinner
jacket with the confidence of a man born to it. He was, in his own way,
attractive, with light brown well-cut
hair, puppy-dog brown eyes and a bright smile. But the hand that shook hers was too
smooth and soft, and his teeth were yellow and crooked.

Yet Gerald looked at her as if
he’d just been offered a wonderful and unexpected gift, and Mariette assumed
by this that he’d got the idea that all girls from New Zealand were bound to
be as plain as a pikestaff.

A bottle of champagne was already
chilling in an ice bucket on their table. Gerald filled their glasses and offered up
a birthday toast to Mariette. ‘I’m told New Zealand is a very beautiful
country,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘But I wasn’t told the girls
there were beautiful too.’

Mariette had never had much opportunity
to drink alcohol. On special occasions, since the age of around fourteen, her father
would pour her a glass of wine, but he always topped it up with water. She’d
had a few sneaky sips of brandy or whisky at friends’ houses, when their
parents were out, but although she liked the idea of drinking, she’d never
liked the taste. But now she found she did like the taste of champagne, and the
loosening-up effect it had on her.

‘Mother will never forgive me, if
I take you home drunk,’ Rose said in warning. ‘So drink it slowly, and
not too much.’

Mariette had to admit that Gerald was a
perfect gentleman. And he was fun too, laughing readily, and all too willing to
dance with her.

The music was too loud to have a
conversation, and she didn’t want to talk anyway – not when she could dance
and get swept away by the music. By the time the tempo slowed, she was feeling
distinctly woozy from the drink, and it was lovely to be held in Gerald’s arms
during the slower dances.

‘May I take you out again?’
he asked. ‘We could go to the theatre, or have dinner.’

‘That
would be lovely,’ she said, leaning into his shoulder. ‘I’d like
that very much.’

Then suddenly Rose said it was time to
go. The last thing Mariette remembered thinking, as they left the club, was that if
this was a taste of nightlife in London, she was never going back home.

As March turned into April, Mariette
noticed that there was a great deal about the Spanish Civil War in the newspapers,
but far less about a war with Germany. When people talked about the possibility, it
was spoken of in such a light-hearted manner that it was hard to take the threat
seriously. Even so, gas masks had been handed out to schoolchildren back in January,
and each day there were more sandbags appearing in front of public buildings. People
were told to stick tape to their windows in a criss-cross pattern, to avoid flying
glass in the event of an air raid, and trenches were being dug in many parks to
provide air-raid shelters.

But there was still no letter from
Morgan.

Mariette veered from thinking it just
took a long time for a letter written at sea to get to England, to being convinced
he’d forgotten her the moment she left the ship. But letters from home reached
her within eight weeks, and she asked herself why he would say he loved her and ask
her to wait for him, if he hadn’t meant it.

She had begun her secretarial course at
Marshalls Secretarial College for Young Ladies, at Swiss Cottage, at the end of
March, which was a distraction from thinking about Morgan. On her first day at
college, there had been a lot of talk about Hitler invading Austria. And almost
every evening, when Mariette arrived home, Noah was either talking to people on the
phone or on his way out to meet people to discuss what this might lead to.

At the end of April, Noah said that he
wanted to go to
Germany, to try to gauge
the mood of the people there for himself. He said he’d been blinkered when he
thought that war could be averted, and he now believed it was inevitable.

He left for Germany a week later, but
when Belle and Etienne telephoned one evening during that time, she didn’t
tell them where Noah had gone, or his opinion about the likelihood of war. As her
parents could only ever talk for three minutes, because of the cost, Mariette filled
the time with tales of what she’d seen or done, and asked about her brothers
and Mog, anything rather than give her father an opportunity to ask leading
questions. She knew if he found out Noah’s opinion had changed, he’d
insist she book a passage on the next boat home, and that wasn’t what she
wanted.

She missed her family more than she had
expected to, but she loved being in England far more. She felt free here, people
weren’t watching her every mood or judging her. Rose had become like an elder
sister and friend rolled into one. Some evenings, she would put her latest record on
the gramophone up in her bedroom, and she’d teach Mariette to dance. Other
times, they went to the pictures or out roller skating. Rose was a bit bossy, and an
awful snob sometimes, but that amused Mariette more than it offended her.

There were lots of evenings too when
Rose went out without Mariette, to meet her friends alone. But that was fine with
Mariette; there was the wireless to listen to, Lisette to talk to in French, and
books to read.

She fitted in well at Marshalls
Secretarial College too. None of the other girls had ever met someone from New
Zealand before, and everyone wanted to be her friend. Shorthand seemed terribly
difficult, but she really liked typing and was already one of the quickest in the
class. She loved talking to the other girls in the lunch break; none of them were as
narrow-minded and naive as the girls back
home. She listened to them talking about the places
they’d been, about their families and the young men they walked out with, and
she felt she was learning more in a week than she would learn in a year in
Russell.

But it was London that she had lost her
heart to, and she didn’t want to leave. The city was beautiful and exciting,
maybe a little dangerous, and she felt she belonged here.

Morgan was another reason why she
didn’t want to leave. Just the thought of his lovemaking made her shiver and
bubble, and she had to trust that he would write, and eventually come back to her.
If she had to go home now, she would always wonder if he was truly ‘the
One’.

Getting a typing and shorthand diploma
would help her case to stay in England. Her parents would be proud of her. And if
she found a job she loved, she didn’t think they’d insist on her
returning home.

The night Noah returned from his
ten-day trip to Germany was one Mariette felt she would never forget, because it
brought home to her the reason why war was inevitable.

His expression had been grave enough to
give them some inkling of his concerns. But the way he hugged each of them was
evidence that he was afraid.

‘I didn’t like the look of
things over there at all,’ he said over dinner. ‘Everyone seems to be in
thrall to Hitler. While it’s true that he has brought Germany out of the
Depression and created full employment again, he’s won his power by destroying
or imprisoning anyone who opposes his ideals and methods.’

‘So you think there really will be
a war?’ Lisette asked, her face stricken.

‘I have no doubt any
longer.’ Noah shook his head sadly. ‘Chamberlain may be intent on
appeasement, but Hitler’s
Nazi
party is all powerful, they will sweep away any opposition. They have Austria now,
and Czechoslovakia – and who knows where else? They are victimizing Jews too. I
spoke to a group on their way to Hamburg, hoping to get a passage to America. They
were born in Germany, fought for their country in 1914, and yet they told me they
would fear for their lives if they stayed.’

‘But why would Hitler do
that?’ Mariette asked.

Noah sighed. ‘Hitler and his Nazi
party appear to see the Jews as the worm in the apple. They blame them for the
terrible inflation that began in 1929, and for just about everything else. In
Berlin, I saw some old Jewish men being forced to get down on their knees and scrub
the street. I couldn’t believe what I saw.’

‘That’s horrible,
Daddy,’ Rose gasped. ‘Couldn’t you stop it?’

Noah looked at her and sighed.
‘How could I, when people all around me were laughing and jeering at those
poor old men? I would have been lynched. I saw a rally where Hitler spoke to a vast
crowd, thousands of people. I couldn’t understand much of what he said, but I
saw a terrible fervour in the eyes of all his followers. They see him almost as a
god, a leader who is going to give them back everything that was taken away from
them in 1918.’

‘Don’t let’s speak of
this any more tonight,’ Lisette begged him. ‘I find it
frightening.’

A few days after Noah’s return
from Germany, Mariette got her first letter from Morgan, posted in New Zealand. She
was so excited, she thought her heart would burst. But as she read it, her heart
sank because she could hardly believe it was Morgan who had written it. It was so
badly scribbled – childish printing, terrible spelling, no punctuation – and there
were no references to anything
they’d talked about or shared when they were together.

He did say he loved her and
couldn’t wait to see her again. He said too that his ship was undergoing some
repairs, but he didn’t say how long this was going to take, not even when he
expected to return. As he hadn’t dated the letter, and the postmark was too
blurred to read the date, for all she knew he could already be back in England by
now.

She spent the next two or three days
brooding on it and realized Morgan had obviously received little or no education. He
had been vague about his upbringing and, apart from mentioning living in the East
End for a time, he’d told her little else. But he was bright and articulate,
so how could he write so badly?

Maybe being able to write a good letter
wasn’t the be all and end all, but Mariette had been brought up to value the
written word, and she felt very uncomfortable knowing that Morgan didn’t have
such basic skills.

By the beginning of May, Mariette was
doing so well at secretarial college that she was now the fastest typist in her
class. Although she still had a way to go to be up to the eighty words a minute
required to get her certificate, and she was still slow at shorthand, her teacher
said she was nearly there.

Just a few days later, while Mariette
was still in a rosy glow about her teacher’s encouraging comments, and
imagining a bright future for herself, a letter came from Morgan. She hadn’t
expected to hear from him again so soon, and it threw her into a tailspin.

He was in London, staying in
Whitechapel, and he asked if she would meet him on Saturday afternoon in Trafalgar
Square.

While her heart leapt involuntarily at
the thought of seeing
him again, she
wasn’t sure it was such a good idea to meet him. It would be easy enough
getting out on a Saturday afternoon – she could say she was going shopping with a
friend from college and then going on to the cinema – but she didn’t want to
deceive Noah and Lisette.

She’d discovered life was far
easier with approval, and she was happy going to college and making friends with
girls who were as well behaved as Rose. Her night out in Soho had shown her that she
could have a wonderful time without being sneaky, or being expected to have sex.

Meeting Morgan would involve both
things.

Just the previous day, Rose had been
talking about one of her friends who had fallen for a man who was, as she put it,
‘from the wrong side of the tracks’.

‘I can see a certain romance in
it,’ she’d said thoughtfully. ‘But she isn’t going to like
living in a couple of rooms in a rough area. I like my comfort too much to be happy
in squalor, even if I did adore the man.’

Rose might be a bit of a snob, but she
had a point. Mariette had grown used to the luxury of her godfather’s home,
and she knew this was how she wanted to live for ever. She was fairly certain Morgan
would never be able to offer her that.

Was it enough to have a man who made her
pulse race? Wouldn’t it be better to write back to Morgan and offer up some
excuse, then try to forget him?

And yet, on Saturday afternoon, Mariette
was in Trafalgar Square in her prettiest floral dress and a white hat. It was a
beautiful day, and the small inner voice that urged her to be sensible and to think
of her future had been overcome by her desire to be in Morgan’s arms
again.

She was watching a woman feeding the
pigeons, with the birds perched on her shoulders, arms and even her head,
when Morgan came up behind her and put
one hand on her shoulder, making her jump.

‘Hello, beautiful,’ he said.
‘Sorry to startle you.’

One look at him and her knees felt they
would buckle. She thought she might have imagined how handsome he was. But here he
was, in bright sunshine, and he looked even better than she remembered. He wore a
white open-necked shirt, grey flannels and a tweed jacket; his dark eyes were just
as twinkly, the cleft in his chin was adorable, and his bronzed face was almost
startling after being surrounded by pale Londoners.

‘It’s good to see you
again,’ she said, suddenly feeling shy. ‘How long before you go back to
the ship?’

‘I’m not going back,
I’m joining the army. I’ve got my medical on Monday.’

He didn’t give her a chance to ask
any further questions because he swept her into his arms to kiss her. She found then
that her feelings for him hadn’t changed; her heart pounded, tingles ran down
her spine and she wanted him.

‘Let’s go to St
James’s Park?’ he suggested, when he finally let her go. ‘A band
plays on Saturdays.’

The warm sun had brought out hundreds of
people, courting couples walking hand in hand, whole families, many of them
picnicking on the grass, and elderly people taking a stroll.

The deckchairs were out in rows in front
of the bandstand, most of them already occupied by people waiting for the band to
arrive. People with children were feeding the ducks on the lake.

Morgan put his jacket down on the grass
for them to sit on. He explained why he thought it was better to enlist now, rather
than waiting to be called up.

‘This way, I get to choose what I
do. I’ve asked for a transport
division or ambulances. If I stayed on the ship till war
was declared, I’d have just been pushed down into the engine room or
something. They certainly won’t be taking passengers anywhere. And you, Mari,
if you want to get back to New Zealand, you should go now while you still
can.’

‘I don’t want to go
home,’ she admitted. ‘I’m just hoping my father won’t order
me back.’ She went on to tell him about the secretarial course she was doing,
and about her life with her aunt and uncle. ‘I miss my family, but
there’s nothing in Russell for me and I’d like to do something to help
out here. My mum drove an ambulance in France in the last war; I couldn’t do
that, but there must be something I could do.’

‘As you speak French you could
apply for a job with the government, they might need bilingual secretaries,’
he said, and then went on to tell her about some of the passengers on the ship and
their reasons for wanting to come back despite the threat of war. ‘People
never know how patriotic they are till they feel their country is threatened. One
man, well into his sixties, told me he didn’t feel he could stay in New
Zealand while younger members of his family here would be facing hardships and
danger. I thought that was a bit mad, like putting your head in the lion’s
mouth, but then I want to do my bit too.’

The clarity and passion in that little
speech reminded her of her concerns about his badly written letter. She worked the
conversation around to asking him where he went to school.

‘Is this about the bad
letters?’ he looked at her, shamefaced. ‘I wanted to get someone else to
write to you. But I couldn’t keep that up, and I’d have had to own up
sometime. I bet you think I’m a right numbskull?’

‘No, because I know you
aren’t. But I was a bit shocked,’ she admitted. ‘I knew there had
to be a good reason for it:
perhaps you
didn’t get much schooling. So tell me now, and then we can forget about
it.’