They don’t have rationing, do they? Thousands of people weren’t killed there, were they? I think you married Thomas just to get away from this horrible place. To get away from Poppy and me.’
‘Dottie, how can you say that? I’ve been crying every night wondering when I’ll see you and Poppy again. It’s crushing me to leave you, and Norwich, and … and everything. You have no idea. It’s my home. I’m going to miss you and Poppy awfully.’
‘If you really cared about us, you’d stay. You promised you’d stay. You promised! You’re a liar, Ellie!’
‘Now, pet, you don’t really mean that. Ellie’s your sister. Blood is thicker than water and all that.’
Dottie tucks her hand around her father’s elbow. ‘Let’s go, Poppy. It’s cold, and I’m hungry. Let’s get some fish and chips. Just the two of us. I saw a place just around the corner.’
***
Ellie stumbles into her cabin with Emmett and the suitcase. Four double bunk beds crowd the floor space and someone has deposited her trunk behind the door. A young woman in an ill-fitting suit leans up on her elbow from the top of one of the beds. ‘Bloody ’ell. A baby? It isn’t a crier, is it?’
Ellie looks down at her ticket and back at the young woman. ‘I’m sorry. I think I’m in the wrong room. I’m meant to be in first class.’
A whoop of laugher. ‘This is it, angel.’ The young woman rises and swings her legs over the side of the bunk, the skin stained with gravy browning to look like tights. Thank goodness for Thomas and his ‘in’ with the American GIs. She’d never been short of nylons.
Ellie takes a deep breath and sets the suitcase down beside the bunk by the small porthole window. ‘Is there anyone here?’
‘Be my guest.’ The rasping of a match against grit. ‘I’m Mona. Had to haul my ass all the way up ’ere from Lewisham. Bloody nightmare.’ She holds the match against a cigarette and inhales until the tip glows red. She blows on the match and drops it on the linoleum floor. ‘Still, I’m off to Toronto. Can’t be worse than Lewisham. They bombed the shit outta that place.’ She sucks on the cigarette as she watches Ellie set Emmett on a bed and free him of the blanket and knitted cap and mitts. ‘Where you off to, luv?’
‘Newfoundland.’
‘Holy shit. I heard about that place. Dated a bloke from there before I met Dave. Better you than me.’
‘Boat,’ Emmett says, fixing Ellie with his serious gaze.
‘Yes, darling. We’re on a boat. And now you’re on a bed. You’ll sleep with me while we’re on the boat and then we’ll go live with Daddy, like I told you.’
She leans over and gives him a kiss on his chubby cheek. Sniffing, she wrinkles her nose. Taking off her coat and her feathered fedora, Ellie lays them neatly on the bed and fishes a cloth nappy out of her suitcase.
‘’Old on, luv! What’re you doing?’
‘Changing his nappy.’
‘Give us a flippin’ break.’ Mona climbs down from her perch and shoves her feet into a pair of sturdy shoes.
The cabin door swings open. A young red-haired woman in a net snood and camel-hair coat stands in the entrance, cradling an infant. She glances around the room in confusion. ‘Is this first class?’
Mona rolls her eyes as she pushes past the new arrival. ‘Bloody Nora. Dave bloody better be worth five days of this or I’ll be straight back to Blighty on a troop ship.’
***
Five days later
Halifax harbour is drab and grey. A flurry of snow swirls over a rocky shoreline and wooden houses like upturned apple crates. Ellie edges her way past the others onto the deck, Emmett clutching her hand as he toddles along beside her.
The crossing had been awful, the waves a seascape of mountains and valleys, the ship like a cork bouncing and tipping its way across the Atlantic. She’d given up trying to eat after the first day, and would have stayed prone on her bed if the stench of vomit and drying nappies hadn’t driven her out to sit on the stairs to the deck where she at least could breathe in the fresh, salty air.
As the grey bulk of the Mauritania steams into the harbour, the juddering black line on the harbour front transforms into a mass of shouting, waving people. Ellie clutches Emmett closer. Thomas is out there somewhere. Waiting to take her and the baby on the train up through Nova Scotia and onto the ferry across to Newfoundland. They’ll be a family in this new land of hers. She can make this work. It will be fine.
She picks up Emmett. Resting his weight against her hip, she points at the wooden buildings clustered along the harbour. ‘Look, Emmy. Houses. Daddy’s there to meet us.’
Emmett fixes his mother with a serious gaze. ‘Boat.’
When she finally disembarks, Thomas is there waiting for them in a dark brown wool coat and a felt fedora. He leans on a crutch and holds up a bag of oranges. His face is lean and lines fan out from the corners of his eyes as he smiles. A thin scar like a sickle loops around his left eye and cheek. He leans forward and kisses her.
‘Ellie Mae.’
Her eyes sweep over the pinned-up trouser leg; at the space where his lower right leg and foot should have been. Setting her jaw in a firm line, she smiles at him. At this stranger. Her husband.
New York City – 9 September 2011
A movement outside the window catches Sophie’s eye. The hawk turns its head, fixing her in its yellow eye as it glides past the shining glass, its orange-red tail feathers a stark contrast to the blue summer sky above the city’s skyscrapers.
‘Sophie? Can I have Jackie book your flight to Newfoundland? You’re clear what the consortium needs you to do?’
Sophie looks across the vast Italian glass desk at Richard Niven, the man whose award-winning architecture practice had drawn her over from London to New York ten years before. His thinning grey hair is cropped close to his bull-like head, and round, black-rimmed glasses frame his piercing hazel eyes. You look like a buzzard. She imagines him in twenty years’ time, jowls dropping from his square jawline, his eyes drooping and watery. By then he’d look like a vulture. Turning into his spirit creature.
‘I understand, Richard.’
‘Those photos you took up on the Newfoundland coast ten years ago, well, that coastline is just what the consortium has been looking for. Luxury travellers love nothing more than a place in an exotic, “eco”—’ he tweaks his fingers to indicate quotation marks ‘—location. Especially one that’s virtually impossible to access. Keeps out the riffraff. We’re talking about absolute exclusivity here, Sophie. They love the idea of Newfoundland. No one’s even heard of the place.’
‘Richard,
