A Quiet Life

When the waiter came up with the menus, Florence took them from him with a quick nod, hardly interrupting their conversation, and even when she knocked a fork to the floor as she opened it, she seemed unflustered. Watching her read the menu, Laura realised that she was one of the first women she had ever met who appeared to have no physical uncertainty. Her dress was shabby, her hair unwaved and her eyebrows unplucked, but her gestures were expansive and her voice determined. Laura had been brought up into the certain knowledge that a woman’s body and voice were always potential sources of shame, that only by intense scrutiny and control could one become acceptable. Hairy shins, stained skirt, smudged lipstick – anything could mark out one’s failure. Laura thought she was doing all right this evening, in her wool crepe dress with the bow at the neck and the navy belt, with her pearl earclips and her unladdered stockings. These had all been bought for this voyage, and allowed Laura to take her seat in the restaurant feeling reasonably confident that she would fit in. Florence, however, seemed to be unaware of such concerns. Planting her elbows on the table, even though one sleeve was actually torn at the wrist, as the restaurant filled up and the waiter hovered to take their order, she went on talking to Laura as if they were alone and no one was watching them.

As she talked, Laura realised again that Florence was not the sort of girl she usually mixed with – not one of us, as Laura’s mother would put it. She had been working since she was fourteen; first, she explained, in her uncle’s glove-making business, and latterly in the offices of a large shipping company. But all the time her real work had been ‘organising’, as she called it. Organising. That could mean almost anything. But in Florence’s stories – she had told two or three stories by the time they had eaten their soup and their tough little chops – it was all about battles, of the powerless against the powerful. She told a story about how she had tried to insist on better conditions in her own uncle’s factory, which had led to her banishment from that side of the family. ‘But Father stuck by me. He is a Party member himself.’ Laura said nothing at that, too incredulous to speak.

Indeed, at first Laura’s role seemed to be only that of the listener. But after a while she began to ask questions, all of them positive, and at one point led Florence back to the story about the stowaway which had so flared in her imagination. After dinner both women felt too keyed up to go back to their rooms, and Laura agreed quickly when Florence suggested that they go up to the deck.

Out there, under the night sky, the wind came shockingly against the girls’ faces. They struggled over to the railings, where they stood looking down into the foam-patterned ocean. ‘You’re going all the way to France, then?’ Laura said, assuming that Florence would be trying to get as near to Spain as possible.

‘No – just England.’ There was a pause, and then she continued. ‘I was really keen on my last job, it was just office work, but I was organising the girls, the typists, the kind of thing that a lot of boys in the Party don’t really understand, but it’s – important, frankly. To get them to understand. But I got into real trouble—’ Then she stopped and looked at Laura. ‘Hell, I don’t know why I’m even thinking of telling you this.’

Laura was entranced. Was she going to be given a confidence already? Girls at school had rarely invited her into their circles of intimacy. Although she was trustworthy – as she saw it – there was something that put girls off giving her the linked arms and whispered secrets that they gave to others. Perhaps because she never shared confidences herself, being too scared that if she once let others scent the dismal smell of failure that hung around her own family, no one would like her, or perhaps because, as one girl once said to her, ‘You’re such a good girl, Laura, you wouldn’t understand.’ But here was this warmly energetic stranger, ready to entrust Laura with her inner life.

Laura had had an unaccustomed glass of wine over dinner, and it had made her movements more open than usual. She put out her hand and touched Florence’s, where it lay on the rail. It was an untypically expansive gesture from her, but Florence was not to know that.

And so Florence launched into another story, about how she had been onto such a good thing with the girls in the shipping company, and how they had taken their demands for job security and paid holiday to their boss, and how he had pretended to give in, and then sacked Florence and some of the others and taken back his promise. She had been so humiliated, she said, after all the girls had put their faith in her, and one night, fired up by fury after visiting one of the girls who had been sacked and who hadn’t eaten that day as she was so worried about how to pay her rent, she, Florence, had broken into the office and destroyed a whole lot of invoicing files. ‘It felt good,’ she said, obviously remembering with some pleasure and then catching herself up, ‘but – ugh, it was the wrong thing to do.’

In Laura’s mind, the action unfolded like a comic strip: the dastardly boss, the daring night raid. But Florence was now describing something much more real and complicated. ‘He obviously suspected me, and the police came to question me. Luckily I was out when they called – I moved to a friend’s apartment, but then I had to move again, and when I told someone in the Party, they called me in to discipline me. Very unhelpful for the revolution, they said. And when I went for other jobs the last few months I didn’t get anything, I felt people knew about it – it was all horrible. Well, this girl I met a couple of years ago, this English girl, has been writing me and encouraging me to come over to Europe. She was in Spain but she’s back in London now, working in a printers. I just thought that it was time to make a fresh start. My uncle, the one who cut me off ages ago, gave Father the money for my ticket. I think everyone thought I’d gone too far in New York.’ Her voice, which had been so strong and certain, seemed thin now, blown back in the wind.

‘It sounds like you did the right thing.’

‘No, no, the Party told me – I mustn’t make things personal like that. We have to organise for collective action, not go off on our own.’

Despite the darkness that surrounded them, Laura was intensely aware of Florence’s physical presence as she spoke, of her little sigh as she leaned backwards, her hands gripping the rail, and the scent of her – sweat, wine, laundry soap – which seemed so warm even in the chilly night air. She shivered.

‘I’m cold too,’ Florence said. ‘Let’s go down.’

‘Are you tired?’

Laura was disappointed at the thought of the evening already coming to an end, but Florence said immediately, ‘We can get a drink in that bar again.’

In her flat shoes, Florence was sure-footed on the iron stairs that led from the deck to the lower floor, but Laura clung tight to the rails. Florence said over her shoulder as they went down, ‘So why are you going to London – family, did you say?’

‘Yes, my mother’s sister – my mother is English.’

‘You sound English yourself.’

‘Do I? That’s only because of Mother.’

‘You remind me of an English actress I once saw in a movie—’

‘Who?’ She was desperate to know how she might be seen by others. Was there someone she was like? How did she strike people? But to her disappointment they were already at the door of the bar and Florence did not reply. There were not many tables free in the lounge now, but Joe waved to them from a table to their left, where he was sitting with two women. It would have been too pointed to ignore him and so, after a quick look at Laura, Florence walked forwards and Joe pulled chairs up to the table.

Introductions were swift; the two new women were called Maisie and Lily, and Laura commented immediately on their English accents. These two women were clearly sisters, with tightly marcelled auburn hair and wide-apart eyes and small mouths, which gave them a look of almost doll-like innocence. That look was belied by their conversation. One of them was telling a tale about a casting manager for a big New York show where they had been working, who thought he was owed favours by every woman in the chorus.

‘But he could never do the job,’ Maisie said with a mocking tone. ‘What he really liked was being told off for being a naughty boy …’

‘Isn’t that the English vice?’

‘Oh, American men are quite as bad,’ Lily said. Laura and Florence fell silent during the conversation, and quite soon Laura got up to say good night, and again to her pleasure Florence got up too and they went down the corridor together.

‘Wait a minute,’ Florence said at the door of her room, and Laura stood uncertainly as she went in and came out again. ‘I thought you might like to read this – yesterday’s now, but anyway.’ It was a copy of the Daily Worker, which Florence obviously thought more suitable reading for Laura than the Hollywood magazine she had seen in her cabin. Laura thought she might feel criticised, but as she walked down the corridor to her room, she realised that what she actually felt was – what was it? – noticed, singled out, even if found wanting.

And that was why, after carefully wiping the make-up off her face with cold cream, the way that she had learned to do from magazines, Laura lay down in the hard, narrow bed and, despite the discomfort of the swell of the boat, she started reading the newspaper that Florence had given her. Most of the headlines, about delegates and conferences, policies and speeches, were too alien to hold her attention, but on an inside page she found a column about women’s lives, by one Sally Barker, which mentioned the importance of men taking a role in domestic work if their wives were to take their place in the revolution. The writer talked about how too many women were trapped at home in America, while in Russia women were able to take their place next to their menfolk in the factories. ‘There we see no selfish husbands who expect servants rather than companions, and no nagging wives who realise life has passed them by. We see women who proudly go out and put their shoulder to the wheel, and men who are not ashamed to rock the cradle.’ Laura read it idly, but after she had put the newspaper down and turned out her light, its words kept drifting through her mind.

And as she slept, the words of the article seemed to thicken and take shape in her dreams, so that Sally Barker took on the form of one of her old teachers from school. She was sitting, in her dream, with Laura in her own living room at home and they were watching her mother sewing a skirt, but then gradually she realised that her mother was stitching the skirt onto Laura’s own body, and she felt ashamed in case her teacher could see the little stains on the skirt where her blood was seeping. It was a surreal, nonsensical dream, she thought when she woke in the small hours, her heart pounding, but she could still feel her panic. As she woke properly, she realised that it was physical discomfort that had woken her, and she struggled out of the bed and staggered to the bathroom to retch over the toilet. As she lay back down again, the ship’s swell seemed greater than ever, and the room horribly claustrophobic in the darkness, and she lay uneasily until she heard the sounds of people coming and going in the corridor and thought it might be time for breakfast.

In the restaurant there was no sign of Florence or the journalist, and so she sat self-consciously on her own. When the waiter put the toast and coffee in front of her, to her horror she realised that she was feeling ill again, and she had to rush out of the restaurant to the nearest bathroom. As she washed her hands and mouth in the little basin, she saw how tired and pinched her face looked in the mirror, and rather than return to the restaurant she went out onto the deck.

‘Feeling okay?’ a voice said to her from a deckchair, and Laura turned to see Joe sitting there.

‘Not my best,’ she muttered.

‘Sit here and eat this,’ he said, offering her a bag of saltines with a casual gesture. Her instinct was to refuse, but then she realised she longed for one. ‘You’ll feel better soon. The weather’s calming, it was a bit of a rough night, wasn’t it? This ship has the worst vibrations of any I’ve ever known.’

‘Have you done this journey before?’

‘Just once. And once from Southampton to France, and down to Morocco and Egypt.’

Laura asked nothing about his travels, but someone as determined to talk as Joe was not to be put off by a lack of direct questions. He told Laura about the boat he’d taken to north Africa, about the film playing that afternoon in the ship’s cinema, which he had seen the previous week in New York, and he called the steward over for hot coffee. In such loquacious company Laura could relax a little, knowing that nothing was expected of her.

At one point he stopped and looked at the newspaper which Laura had put down at her feet. ‘You’re not a Red too, are you?’

‘Florence gave it to me—’

‘Still, they’re right about some things,’ Joe said, taking the newspaper and looking at the front page. ‘At least they get what’s going on in Europe. They don’t do the “if only, if only” – you know, “if only he was a nicer guy or he would accept this or that” – they can see that kind of stuff is all baloney, that there’s got to be a showdown sooner or later.’

At this, Laura said nothing. She and her mother and sister had all convinced one another that war was a long way off, and even if they had done so simply because they wanted to believe that a trip to London was still possible, the conviction was now hard to throw off. Joe went on talking, about what he couldn’t stand about communism, how they wanted everyone to toe the line. ‘They want everyone to be the same,’ he was saying.

To her own surprise, Laura found herself shaking her head. She had only that one article to go on, but she found herself saying something, which sounded inarticulate even to herself, about how it was everyone else who wanted women to be the same, and it was good if the communists thought that they could be free. Almost as soon as she had started to speak, she tailed off, and Joe laughed and started to tell her she was wrong, and that women wanted to be real women, not workers, but she was hardly listening. It was as though only on saying the word ‘free’ had she realised what she had been thinking all night – and not just that night, but forever, for as long as she could remember – about her home life, about her mother … yes, it was Mother who loomed in her mind, Mother’s nagging, her carping, and even, from time to time, on dark nights full of awful yells and worse silences, her sobbing. She had always resented Mother, always blamed her, but that word ‘free’ had hurt her as soon as she had tried to say it, because it was the word that Mother had spoken once, on the one occasion she had tried to speak to Laura seriously, she had told her not to give up her freedom as she had done. Freedom. What had Mother given up? As the unbidden memories crackled through Laura’s mind, she closed her eyes, the cracker she was eating an inedible lump in her mouth, and she heard Joe asking if she was going to be ill, and she made herself open her eyes and smile. That’s what you do, you stay quiet, you open your eyes, you smile. Whatever you do, you never open the door to the place where the yells and the sobbing can be heard. ‘I guess you’re right,’ she said quietly, as Joe told her that women didn’t want to have to work in the same way men did, and that communists had no idea what women really wanted. ‘Fashion, families, you know.’

‘They have fashion in the paper,’ Laura said, looking down at the newspaper that had caused the argument, and then knowing that she had been much too combative already, she smiled a dismissive little smile and asked Joe another question about what he was going to do when he got to Southampton – or Le Havre? He was happy to keep talking, and Laura found she didn’t have to speak much more, while he was so eager to air his views and experiences.

As the swell did indeed die down, and the sun appeared weakly, one of the auburn-haired girls, Maisie, joined them. She complained of a headache, but she was still breezy company, one of those people who worked hard to match each anecdote in a conversation with one of her own, so that between the two of them Laura could sit more or less in silence, her fur coat buttoned up to her chin, beginning to feel better as the wind blew over them.

‘Florence!’ she called, seeing a tall figure, her hair whipping back, walking along the deck.

‘Did I have a bad night …’ Florence said, sitting down heavily beside them.

‘Me too.’

‘The woman in my cabin was being ill all night … ugh. Listening to sounds of someone else vomiting when you’re trying to sleep … It stinks in there this morning, too.’

Laura commiserated with her, but Florence seemed less friendly than she had the day before, shrunk into herself. ‘It’s too cold to sit here, how can you stand it?’ she asked and Laura could see her shivering in her cloth coat.

‘We did the journey the other way in the summer – much better,’ Maisie said. ‘We went swimming – look at it now.’

They all looked down at the open tourist-class swimming pool, its water whipped into waves by the wind.

‘Didn’t you say that people go over to the first-class side to swim?’ Laura asked, and Joe told them again that he had heard from other passengers that there was an easy way to the indoor swimming pool through the engine room. She found herself unexpectedly intrigued by the idea, and so, clearly, did Maisie.