Ship of Brides (56 page)
Authors: Jojo Moyes
‘So no regrets?’
Frances shook her head. ‘I think they were very happy. Oh, don’t get me wrong, Jenny dear, no marriage is without its hiccups. But I always had the impression that in Joe Margaret had found a good man.’
‘What about Avice?’ She laid a heavy emphasis on the A, as if still amused by the anachronistic nature of her name.
‘I don’t really know.’ It had begun to rain, and Frances was watching the drops streaming diagonally across the glass. ‘She wrote once to say she’d gone back to Australia and to thank me for everything I’d done. Rather a formal letter, but I suppose that wasn’t a surprise.’
‘I wonder what happened to him,’ said Jennifer. ‘I bet he divorced that woman in the end.’
‘Do you know? He didn’t. We met him once, didn’t we?’ Her grandmother nudged her grandfather. ‘At a drinks do about twenty years ago. We were introduced to them and I remembered where I’d heard the name before.’
Jennifer leaned forward, interested. ‘Did you say anything?’
‘No. Well, not exactly. But in conversation I made sure I told him what ship I’d come over on, and gave him a bit of a look. Just so he knew. He went quite pale.’
‘Went home pretty early, if I remember,’ said her grandfather.
‘That’s right, he did.’ They beamed in joint satisfaction.
Jennifer sat back in the upholstered seat, wishing she could light a cigarette. She pulled her phone from her back pocket to see if Jay had texted her again, but her inbox was empty. She would text him when she got home. He would be back in two weeks and she wanted to see him again, but she didn’t want him getting any ideas. He had the potential, she thought, to get clingy. ‘You know, I don’t understand why you two didn’t just get it together on the ship, if you liked each other so much,’ she said, putting her phone away. She was vaguely irritated by the way they looked at each other then, as if what they had shared had been something she could not possibly understand.
Her voice became more assertive. ‘It just strikes me that people of your generation often made things far more difficult for yourselves than they needed to be.’
They said nothing. Then, from the back seat, she watched her grandfather’s hand slide over to take her grandmother’s and give it a squeeze. ‘I suppose that’s possible,’ he said.
When he had told her the truth about his marriage, about what it meant for the two of them, she had been silent. She had sat down on the grass, her expression stilled, as if she were only just able to absorb what he was telling her.
‘Frances?’ He seated himself beside her on the grass. ‘Remember what you said to me, the night the planes went over the side? It’s over, Frances. It’s time to move on.’
She had turned to him slowly, her expression almost fearful, as if she could not trust herself to believe what he was saying.
‘This is the beauty in it, Frances. We’re allowed this. No, we’re entitled to it.’
Underlying the determination, there was a faint note of panic in his voice, as if she might somehow disallow herself the chance to be happy, as if he, too, might be one of the things for which she felt the need to atone.
‘We’re entitled, you hear me? Both of us.’
She had stared fiercely at her feet, and he had thought briefly that she was still closed to him. Unreachable. And then he had seen that she was hiccuping, as if her chest struggled to contain some huge, unbalancing emotion.
A faint sound escaped her, and he saw she was smiling and crying at the same time, her hand reaching clumsily across the ground for his.
They had stayed there for some unknown period of time, their hands entwined, pressed into the rough grass. Chattering families passed them on their way home, occasionally eyeing them knowingly but without curiosity, a marine and his sweetheart, reunited after a lifetime spent apart.
‘You are Nicol,’ she had told him, as she traced the still bruised lines of his face with her fingers. ‘The captain told me. Nicol. Your name is Nicol.’ The way she said it was joyful. It made it sound like treasure.
‘No,’ he said, with certainty, and as he spoke his voice sounded strange, unfamiliar even to himself, for it had been years since anyone had said this word. ‘I am Henry.’
About the Author
Jojo Moyes was born in 1969 and was brought up in London. A journalist and writer, she worked for the Independent newspaper until 2001. She lives in East Anglia with her husband and three children.
She is the author of
Sheltering Rain, Foreign Fruit,
which won the RNA Novel of the Year award for 2003,
The Peacock Emporium
and
The Ship of Brides,
shortlisted for the 2005 RNA award.
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