Chapter 42

Chapter 42

Violet

Frangipani

The time passes like the weather. Sometimes it races like a great North Easterly– the blast of harsh early mornings the prelude to days of rushing and carrying. Other times, the hours seem to hang like a still, grey day. The work is slower, but the passengers' demands are never-ending, like the vast sky that sweeps above them. Then there are a few precious times when the weather is perfect and the languorous days are there to be stepped into like a warm bath. She remembers when her first ship arrived in the West Indies and the Big Barbadian took her to meet his family. They sat at a long table by the beach, the air rich with a fragrance his mother told her was from the frangipani flower. They ate food she had never dreamt of and drank a heady, caramel punch that gave her dreams of home.

Since then, she has returned home a few times, made her way onto different ships and finally found her sea legs. She is a proper sailor now– if she smoked a pipe, she would pack it with Faithful Lover. She has discovered other crew members who are friendly, like the Big Barbadian. Some are too friendly; she knows her mother would shake her fist at them. She has learnt to step and sidestep, twist her waist to avoid an arm, duck her head to dodge a kiss. Sometimes she hums a tune in her head as she does this, as if it is a private dance.

She has met no one else like her first cabinmate, who would have shut the door on life just for the pleasure of keeping it waiting in the cold. Most people are like her– they have their good ways and their bad ways– and the majority of transgressions are easy to ignore. Like when the soup chef spits Italian curses if he feels a storm is brewing, or the potboy takes more than his share of milk for the kitten everyone knows he keeps under his bed. Or when the cashier pretends she has made a mistake so that the restaurant manager will lean over her shoulder to examine her exquisite figure work.

As she moves around the ship– rushing to fetch and carry, pausing to take orders, hovering on the ball of a foot to exchange a glance, a smile, a raised eyebrow– she tries to hold fast to her mother's favourite maxim: love thy neighbour as thy self. It is easier with some neighbours than others. But then her mother had never told her that life was easy.

There is a rhythm to her days that she has come to accept, if not love. She sometimes imagines she is sat on a fairground ride; the people around her look happy or sick or frightened, but her own face is blank. In her mind's eye, she watches a man in a leather waistcoat and mustard scarf turning the handle of the ride. Only he knows how fast they will spin or where they will go. She does not know many people who run their own rides– most people are like her, sitting, waiting, making the best of it.

She knows she is better off than the stewardesses who leave their children behind each time they go to sea, the sailors' widows who Mr Turkey spoke so highly of. She still does not know their ages, and she thinks it would be hard to guess, because leaving their children has lined their faces just like the years have done.

Sometimes she wonders if the faint line between her brows has been drawn there by her sister's finger.