Belle - Lesley Pearse [151]
All the crew were very excited about stopping here. Second Lieutenant Gregson had remarked that they would be blind drunk within an hour of going ashore. He’d told her that this was the place men often jumped ship, sometimes intentionally but more often because they got too drunk to get back to the ship before she sailed. He complained that it was part of his duties to try to round them all up at the end of the evening, which meant he had to stay relatively sober.
Once everyone had disembarked and the ship became quiet, Belle felt very sad and dejected. She tried to sleep to make the hours go faster till they sailed again, but she remained annoyingly alert. She kept thinking that by the time she got to France it would be Christmas, and shortly after that it would be two years since Millie was killed and that until that night she hadn’t really understood what a brothel was. It was difficult to believe she’d ever been that naive, but then Mog and her mother had probably threatened the girls that they’d be thrown out if they talked to Belle about what they did upstairs.
How things had changed since then! She’d travelled thousands of miles and gone from virgin to whore, child to grown woman. She didn’t think there was anything new to learn about men now; all those romantic ideas she’d once had about courtship, love and marriage were gone.
One of Belle’s favourite ways to pass the time on the ship was studying crew members and imagining each of them in Martha’s. Gregson, the second Lieutenant, was the youngest officer and unmarried. He had the blond, blue-eyed look of a story-book hero; she thought he would be the kind to get helplessly drunk, and when he finally got upstairs with one of the girls he would pass out.
First Lieutenant Attlee, a forty-year-old married man from St Louis, believed himself to be some kind of Don Juan. Belle thought he looked like a weasel, for he was slightly built yet tall, with sharp little dark eyes that darted around a room as if afraid of missing something. She sensed that he was the peeping Tom kind, one of those men who got a bigger thrill watching others having sex than doing it himself.
Captain Rollins was harder to pigeon-hole. He was very much the family man – on his desk he had pictures of his pretty wife and three children, and he spoke of them fondly. Yet she also felt there was another side to him, for when she had admitted about Martha’s it was clear he knew his way about such places. She felt he was an opportunist, and that while he wouldn’t force himself on to any woman, he was the kind to inveigle his way into a situation where a woman would find it hard to resist him. She suspected he was a passionate man who would be a good and generous lover.
That thought made Belle smile. He might come in useful when they got to Marseille.
Belle passed a bowl for Avril Germaine to be sick in, and wiped her forehead with a wet flannel, feeling genuine sympathy. She remembered how ill Etienne had been with seasickness, and Avril’s wail that she thought she was going to die made Belle feel she must do what she could to help the woman. As she vomited again, her face was as green as the rough blanket Belle had wrapped round her after helping her out of the soiled sheets on her bunk.
‘You are not going to die,’ Belle said firmly, taking the bowl from her hands and emptying it in the slop pail. She sluiced the bowl with water, then handed it back in case Avril was sick again. ‘The storm will blow itself out in a few hours and you’ll feel better again then.’
Avril was a small, pretty woman with fair, curly hair, pale blue eyes and a complexion like porcelain. Her clothes were expensive and beautiful, and she reminded Belle of a china doll in a picture book Mog had given her