tourist-class restaurant, and after eating their steaks and apple tart Florence and Laura sat watching a few couples on the little dance floor. Florence was talking when Joe stopped at their table to ask her if she wanted to dance, and she shook her head. He raised his eyebrows at Laura, and she bit her lip. ‘I can’t dance like that,’ she said, motioning to where Maisie and Lily were dancing with a couple of men. They were fast and slick, turning and turning on neat lines.
‘Who cares?’ Joe said, catching her hand, and on an impulse Laura stood up. He was not a great dancer either, and Laura felt that they were the clumsiest people moving in the room. There was something so exposed about dancing while people were dining, looking up from their plates to watch you turn and step. At one point she looked back at their table and saw that Florence was no longer there, and she loosed her hand from Joe’s. ‘I must just find Florence—’ and then turned to smile at him politely, ‘but thank you.’
She walked up the stairs to the deck, and sure enough there was Florence, her voice was clear in the night air. ‘I think that you should be standing up to them,’ she said. She was talking to the steward again. ‘If they are really trying to bring down your wages because of that, well—’
‘Florence!’
Florence waved to her, but turned back to the steward. Their voices were lowered as Laura walked towards them, but she heard Florence tell the man something about someone he needed to talk to in New York. As Laura came to stand next to them, she told them not to mind her, but the man looked at her with some embarrassment and then moved off.
‘Was I interrupting?’ She heard how her voice sounded, reedy and uncertain. Florence shrugged. They stood at the rails, but the urgency of their conversations over the last few days seemed to have left them. As they stood there, the music from the swing band downstairs was heard through an open door, spilling out onto the deck and the ocean. Laura felt its rhythms again, and remembered the touch of Joe’s hand and his clumsy energy as they danced.
‘There will be so much to do when we’re in London,’ Florence said, and Laura realised all of a sudden how near her aunt’s house was. Her aunt, and the cousins, Winifred and Giles, who had sounded so formal in the letters they had written, were waiting for her in that grey city, ready to take her back into the embrace of family life. Florence, she knew, was thinking of a different London, a city that she thought was readying itself for war, a city where she thought she could be useful. They talked idly for a while about when the boat was likely to get to Southampton the next day, and then Florence said that she thought she would go back to the cabin and finish her book. ‘Damn, I left my scarf in the restaurant,’ she said.
‘I left my handkerchief too,’ Laura said, although she knew perfectly well that her handkerchief was in the pocket of her coat, back in their cabin, ‘I’ll go.’ She left Florence on the dark windy deck and went back down. Through the doors to the restaurant, it was all warmth and light. A number of couples were dancing now, but in the centre of them were Maisie and Lily dancing together, moving even more sharply than when they’d danced with the men, the fastest rumba Laura could imagine. The music seemed to be shaking off their bodies as they tripped backwards and forwards.
‘They’re not bad,’ said Joe, suddenly at her elbow. ‘You rushed off …’
Laura apologised. ‘I had to find Florence.’ She saw Florence’s scarf on the back of a chair, but rather than moving over to pick it up, she turned back to Joe. ‘Dance again?’ she said. This time they moved together with more ease, and as the number ended Laura could feel the sweat springing up under her arms. ‘I must take Florence her scarf,’ she said, but she said so looking at Joe, and this time they went together out of the restaurant. Upstairs, however, the deck was empty. Instead of moving back downstairs to look for Florence, Laura paused.
‘Smoke?’ Joe’s voice was very near to her ear.
She took one although she hardly wanted it, the freshness of the salt air was so keen. As he lit it, Joe looked into her face, and Laura felt that their bodies were even closer than they had been when they were dancing.
‘So, your comrade’s preparing another lecture for you?’
‘She doesn’t lecture me.’
‘I’ve heard her.’ Joe flicked a match into the water. It spun, a tiny bead of light, in the darkness. Laura caught anger under his words, but before she could ask him about it, he turned back to her and smiled. ‘Your eyes are shining in the moonlight. Has anyone ever told you what pretty eyes you have?’
Nobody ever had, but Laura laughed in what she hoped was a sophisticated way. She didn’t know what to say, and felt shaken by the desire that rose up suddenly in her, a desire for his compliment to be not just an easy line but something that he had found hard to say, something that bore testament to his view of her. And then he did what she realised she was waiting for him to do, and put a hand behind her back and slid it down, over her dress, over her buttocks. Laura was unable to move as pleasure, so forceful it seemed to deny her a sense of consciousness, flooded through her, loosening her joints and heating her skin.
‘What your friend wants,’ he was whispering, ‘I can see that … But what you want – what do you want?’
She hardly heard his words, she was so focused on his touch. He threw his cigarette away over the side, and put his right hand up to Laura’s face, stroking his thumb over her cheek and then putting it against her mouth. To Laura’s own surprise, she did not move away from him, and her lips opened against his thumb, and tentatively her tongue touched it. ‘So you do know what you want,’ he whispered urgently into her ear. The hand that had been on her back was now between her thighs, and as it moved up to the skin above her stocking top her mouth opened suddenly wider, and a groan escaped her.
‘Come on then,’ he said, pushing his hand up to her underwear, which had become so wet that his fingers slid on the silk. Lost in the molten pleasure that his touch was giving her, Laura was unaware of anything but the pressure of his fingers, but then he stepped away and took her hand. ‘Come on,’ he said again. ‘No need to provide the entertainment,’ and to her shame she saw a steward walking past them and realised that Joe was smiling at her, as though she was amusing him. ‘Let’s get some privacy – my cabin mate is drinking in the restaurant, we can be alone for a bit. Long enough, anyway.’ He raised his eyebrows at her, and suddenly his obvious amusement at what was happening made her feel ashamed.
‘I must go and find Florence,’ she said. Her words were clipped.
‘Come on,’ his hand held her wrist now, and it was too tight. Laura tried to pull away, but his grip tightened even more.
‘Stop it,’ she said, horribly aware that she could still feel the wetness between her thighs, that she wanted his hand back there, and that her voice sounded half-hearted.
‘Don’t go back to the lectures.’
‘She doesn’t—’
‘What, does she give you any of this?’ His left hand pushed up again, under her dress. ‘Does she? Or is she just teaching you about how to be a good little worker, how to forget what you want for the good of the masses?’ The hand still gripping her wrist was hurting her, and the other one was pushing her legs apart again, and though the sparks of pleasure were intense, so too was the anger, coming hard on the heels of the pleasure. He was smiling at her, and his teeth, which looked yellowy with nicotine stains in the daylight, were white.
Making a huge effort, she pulled away from him and smoothed down her dress. ‘You have no idea—’
‘No,
