The Boat Girls (32 page)

She said furiously, ‘I don't give a damn.'

‘Don't tell me you're still moping after Jack Carter?'

‘He's got nothing to do with it.'

‘Hasn't he? I bet you're still dreaming those dreams about him and picturing yourself living on the cut with him for ever and ever amen. How gloriously happy you'd be, spending the rest of your days cooped up in a rabbit hutch with a man who can't read or write—'

‘Shut up, Ros!'

Prue looked upset. ‘Please, don't let's quarrel.'

‘We're not quarrelling, Prue. I'm just pointing out to Frankie how silly and selfish she's being. Wouldn't
you
sooner stay in comfort with the Whitelaws than be here?'

‘Well, yes, I suppose so.'

‘There you are, skipper. You've got a mutiny on your hands.'

In the end she gave way, and they collected their sponge bags and the most respectable clothing they could find and trudged back to the Hall.

In the afternoon they built a giant snowman on the lawns, played ping-pong in the games room
and Monopoly in the sitting room beside the fire. Hugh had spent the day out rough shooting and didn't reappear until dinner time – venison pie, apple turnover, wine flowing. What with the food and the wine and the warmth, Frances began to feel quite at ease until, after dinner, Hugh came to sit beside her. He offered her a cigarette and lit it for her.

‘Tell me honestly, Frances, what do you think of this house?'

‘It's very . . . impressive.'

He smiled. ‘You don't have to be so polite. It's actually quite hideous. My grandfather made a fortune from coal and cotton and decided he wanted to live somewhere pleasant, away from the mines and the mills, so he built this enormous white elephant.'

‘Is that his portrait in the hall?'

‘He never did things by halves. I'm very fond of the place, actually. It grows on you.'

She said, ‘We're not used to space. We don't have any on the boats.'

‘I know. I've seen inside them when I used to hang about the Stoke Bruerne locks as a child. I was fascinated by the narrowboats and the boat people. I remember wanting to run away with them – like children dream of running away with a circus, or going off with the gypsies, or sailing away on a pirate ship.'

‘I have an ancestor who was a pirate. He built our house in Dorset with his booty.'

‘Did you ever dream of running off with pirates?'

‘Not pirates,' she said slowly. ‘With gypsies.'

‘The boat people are very similar.'

‘They'd hate to hear you say that. It's a big insult to them.'

‘It wasn't meant as one. Far from it. They're both nomadic people – very proud and with an enormous amount of dignity. And they both lead very tough lives. When I grew up I realized that and stopped wanting to run away with them.' He smiled at her again. ‘Are you still thinking of staying on the narrowboats after the war?'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I don't know what I'll do.'

They went skating on the lake and tobogganing down the hills and walking through the woods, collecting bundles of sticks for the cabin stoves. Sometimes Hugh came with them, other times not. Three days later, they heard that the ice-breaker had got through as far as Stoke.

When she said goodbye, he kissed her cheek briefly. ‘After the war's over, Frances, I hope we meet again.'

Then he kissed Ros's cheek, and Prue's too, and said exactly the same thing to them. As she pointed out triumphantly to Ros, she'd got it all wrong about Hugh liking her.

Ros looked at her. ‘No, I hadn't, darling. He's just waiting for you to wake up, that's all.'

The ice-breaker had cut a pathway of open water down the centre of the cut and they followed in its wake. Blisworth tunnel was clear, the air inside almost warm, but further on they faced the Bugby seven all alone. The boats nosed great lumps of loose ice into the entrance to each lock, which then had to be propelled out before there was enough room for them to go all the way in. It was a long battle and they took it in turns to be up on the wall, wielding the long shaft from a height, or staying down in the butty hatches which meant using the short shaft and working on their knees for fear of overbalancing into the water. The blocks of ice kept slipping and sliding away from them and floating off in the wrong direction. The trick, as they discovered, was to harpoon them firmly in the centre and pass them on until they could be pushed firmly out into the cut. Struggling through the first lock took more than three hours and they had to stop and rest. After sitting down to a proper dinner they had recovered, and went on to the next where the lock-keeper appeared, shaking his head.

‘You'll not get far today, ladies. There's more trouble ahead.'

With his help, they manoeuvred the boats into
the lock and got the bottom gates shut. The lock filled, the top gates opened and they went very slowly on their way. The open channel was already freezing over and, once again,
Orpheus
had to act as ice-breaker as well as pulling the loaded butty. If the engine breaks down now, Frances thought grimly, we've had our chips. But, by a miracle, it didn't, and they climbed laboriously through the third lock before tying up for the night. They had been on the go for more than nine hours and slept like the dead for twelve more.

It was another two days before the ice melted enough for them to continue and deliver their cargo of steel to Birmingham, where the snow had beautified the normally ugly scene. When they loaded up with coal at Longford wharf it had been churned to a dirty grey. There was snow all the way down to the Glaxo factory where they unloaded. Back at the Bulls Bridge lay-by with the empty boats, Frances reported to the company office and collected their mail. Ros's family rarely bothered to write, but there was a letter from Vere and another from Aunt Gertrude and a small package for Prue. She took them all back to the boats and started to read the one from Vere.

Prue gave a choked sob; she was staring at the piece of paper in her hand.

‘What is it, Prue?'

She didn't answer and Frances took it from her. It was a brief letter and rather badly typed.

‘Oh, Prue . . . I'm so sorry. So
very
sorry.'

SHE REMEMBERED WHERE
his flat was and went up in the rickety lift to the top floor. He opened the door, yawning and scratching.

‘Remember me, Ken?'

‘Of course I do, love. Once seen, never forgotten. Come on in.'

She picked up her carpet bag and went inside.

‘I've been having a kip. Generally do that, if it's not a matinee. How've you been, Rosalind? Still sailing those boats?'

‘You can't sail them. No sails. One has an engine and pulls the other.'

‘Yeah . . . Like sometea? I've got some somewhere . . . make us both a mug, would you?'

She found the packet of Lyons Green Label and a teapot in the cubbyhole that passed for a kitchen, and put the kettle to boil on the gas ring. When she carried the mugs into the other room he
was lying on the sofa, smoking. He heaved himself up and made room for her at one end.

‘Thanks, love. Have a fag.'

He was still doing the Rattigan, he told her, and had reached the stage where he went through every performance like an automaton, speaking the lines but thinking of something else entirely – like what he'd have for supper afterwards – the steak and kidney or the bangers and mash, or maybe the liver and onions.

‘I come to when the audience starts clapping at the end and I can't remember a bloody thing about the bit in between.'

She laughed. ‘I don't believe you.'

‘It's true, love. And it looks like we're going to run for another three months at least.'

‘Lucky you.'

‘Yeah, but I'm getting sick of it. I'm ready for something else.'

‘Such as?'

‘Well, a bloke from Stratford came backstage the other evening . . . wanted to know if I'd be interested in auditioning for them.'

‘What did you say?'

‘I said I'd think about it – which I'm doing.'

She would have given her right arm for the chance. ‘Sounds exciting. But I thought you wanted to direct.'

‘Yeah, I do. I don't want to get bogged down in
Shakespeare. Prancing about in doublet and hose, doing what some airy-fairy git tells me.' He waved his arms around and launched into an excruciating parody.

‘I'm thinking of starting up my own company – putting on brand new plays, not ones written three hundred years ago. Trying out new things, new ways, new ideas. What do you say to that?'

‘I say, don't forget me when you do.'

‘Not likely. Not with your looks. Are you staying here again tonight?'

‘I have to be back at the boats first thing in the morning.'

‘Up to you, love. I can get you a ticket for the play this evening. And we'll go and grab some nosh after. We can have another chat then.'

She sat in the front row of the stalls and he was just as good, close up, as from the back row of the gods. If he was thinking about something else entirely, nobody in the audience would ever have known.

It was bitterly cold again when they let go from Bulls Bridge and took the empty boats down to Limehouse. They were all afraid of the docks. At first it had been because of the German bombers, then the doodlebugs and now the V2s. The boats
were sitting ducks trapped in a landlocked basin, and they'd seen what blast could do, let alone a direct hit. Rather than sit there waiting for a rocket to arrive, they clambered up the vertical iron ladder and went off to the Prospect of Whitby pub to spend the evening in the rowdy company of merchant seamen, who bought them drinks and treated them with perfect courtesy.

The foreign sailor who had stared so hard at Prudence in the Chinese restaurant that Pip had taken them to, came in and stared at her again. She tried to ignore him but, after a while, he came over. His name was Aleksei, he told her, and he was Russian. He had seen her once before and had hoped very much to see her again. He would like to know her name. Also, where she lived. Everything about her. His English was hard to understand, but his pale eyes weren't. She had a fiancé, she said quickly, looking away and going red. A Canadian airman. They were going to be married after the war.

‘But you have no ring.'

‘We haven't bought it yet.'

‘Where is he, this airman?'

‘I don't know at the moment.'

‘You do not know?'

‘Not exactly.'

He moved closer and she retreated until her back was up against the wall.

‘But I am here. And he is not. So we can talk together. Please to tell me your name.'

In the end, Frances and Ros rescued her and they went back to the boats. She wept silently into her pillow.
But I am here. And he is not.

In the morning, they were loaded with bundles of rusty iron bars which thudded and clanged into the holds, making poor
Orpheus
and
Eurydice
shudder as they sank lower and lower and lower. The holding chains slithered away like snakes and the job of sheeting-up was painfully done with frozen fumbling fingers. When they finally let go and moved away from the wharf, the loaders, already busy on another pair, stopped work to whistle and wave.

With Ros steering the motor and Frances the butty, Prudence occupied herself making a new fender for the motor's stern. The old man in the sailmaker's shop at Braunston had shown her how to work the cotton line into a beautiful round shape, like a great fat ball of woven string. When it was done, she was going to start on a pair of hemp tip-cats to hang each side of the fender, so that the blades and the elum were protected. Keeping busy helped her not to think so much about Steve. He'd talked a whole lot more about Canada and how much she'd like living there. About his family – mother, father, two sisters and two brothers, aunts and uncles and cousins. And
he'd talked about where they might live and how in summer he'd take her to the cottage on the lake and they'd catch fish and cook them over a fire. Even how many children they'd have. Four, at least, he'd said – if she didn't mind. He liked big families. And he'd told her about his other ideas for inventions: a machine that cleared away snow from pathways, a heated steering wheel, heated driving gloves. They'd talked and they'd talked and she could remember every single thing he'd said. She'd never give up hope.
Missing, believed killed
wasn't at all the same thing as
killed in action
. It meant that there was a chance. Nobody had actually found Steve dead, or knew what had happened to him. But missing where? Over the sea – in which case there was really no hope at all. Or over land – over France or Germany – which meant that there was some, but that it would be a long while until anything was officially reported. One of the cashiers at the bank had waited nearly six months for news of her son who'd been missing after Dunkirk. The Red Cross had eventually sent word that he was a prisoner of war in a camp in Poland. Only, since Prudence wasn't officially next of kin, nobody would notify her. Only Steve himself would do that. All she could do was wait and pray and never give up hope. Every night she prayed, not kneeling like she used to but in bed, in the dark, before she went to sleep.
Please God, let
Steve be alive. Let him come back safely.
She said it under her breath, over and over again.