Love...Maybe: The Must-Have Eshort Collection. Julia Williams

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СКАЧАТЬ or visiting tearooms on his days off. She assumed they’d be wed after he finished his apprenticeship as a butcher, but in fact the long-awaited proposal never came. When rumours reached Gerda that he’d been seen dancing with another woman – a very pretty woman, according to her informant – she was simply surprised. It seemed incongruous. Alan had never struck her as a ladies’ man, with his ruddy face, thinning hair and big-knuckled hands. He’d seemed like a safe bet.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ he said when she raised the subject. ‘I’m very fond of you, Gerda; you’re a nice girl, but I don’t love you the way you should love someone you’re planning to spend the rest of your life with.’

      ‘What on earth does that mean? You’re just looking for pastures new. You’re a charlatan.’ The anger erupted out of her and she kept berating him until he picked up his hat, apologised one last time and disappeared.

      ‘What will folk say?’ Thomasine worried. ‘You’re tainted goods; all the time you’ve spent together without a chaperone and now he’s gone and taken up with someone else. He’s ruined you.’

      Wherever Gerda went, she saw people gazing at her with undisguised sympathy, or whispering behind their hands. It will pass, she thought; but six months later when Alan married the ‘other woman’, the gossip started again and this time she’d had enough. To be thrown over by any man was bad enough, but to be thrown over by someone as unappealing as Alan Slaven had spoiled her chance of finding a decent husband in South Shields. She thought of going to America then but her father got ill and she couldn’t bear to leave and miss the time he had left. It was only after he died, when she was twenty-four, that she travelled to New York to lodge with her mother’s old friend Else Gabrielson. It was to be a fresh start in a country where no one knew her, a place where she could find a husband who didn’t know she was so-called ‘tainted goods’. Perhaps she had left it too late because, five years on, on the 1st of May 1915, here she was on the Lusitania, heading home again without a man. The neighbours would look at her ringless hand and sigh. Unless …

      How could she tell if Jack Welsh was sincere? He seemed to enjoy spending time with her and they conversed easily, but what if it was simply a shipboard dalliance for him, a way of making the voyage pass more quickly? How could she ever be sure? And then she remembered him saying they would sink or swim together and thought what a chivalrous thing that was to say. She hoped to goodness he had meant it.

      *

      Next morning, Jack was waiting when Gerda entered the dining room for breakfast and he came to sit by her, enquiring how she had slept and asking if her cabin was comfortable. She found herself telling him what her cabin-mate Ellen had said about folks calling them lovebirds, and was interested to find it did not bother him in the slightest.

      He chortled: ‘So we are to be the on-board entertainment, are we? We should put on a good show in that case.’ With a wink, he reached over to squeeze her gloved hand.

      Gerda giggled and turned her face away so he couldn’t see she was blushing.

      ‘I like that smile,’ he said. ‘Your secret smile.’

      After breakfast, there was a church service conducted by Captain Turner in the second-class lounge, which had mahogany tables, armchairs and settees on a plush rose carpet, and long windows looking out to sea. Jack sang the hymns enthusiastically, if a little off-key. Gerda mouthed the words from the sheet, unfamiliar with the Anglican service, and glanced round at the smart outfits of the first- and second-class women: she spotted the designer Carrie Kennedy wearing a fur-trimmed red velvet suit, and her sister Kathryn Hickson in an elegant grey suit with seven-eighths jacket. Afterwards, she and Jack wandered out on deck and stood at the rail, gazing across the vastness of the ocean.

      ‘Do you think there will be any icebergs?’ she asked, her mind on the sinking of the Titanic three years earlier. She’d pored over every single news report of the tragedy, and bought whole magazines devoted to the subject. Mrs Gabrielson accused her of being obsessed, but surely it had struck a nerve with anyone who ever crossed the Atlantic.

      ‘We’re a few weeks later than the Titanic sailed and we’re on a much more southerly route, so there’s nothing to worry about from icebergs,’ Jack told her.

      ‘Did you read much about the Titanic? I often wondered what I would have done if I was there. The people in third class had such a terrible time.’

      ‘Things have changed a lot since then: we’ve got enough lifeboats for all the passengers, to start with.’ He pointed to one swinging on davits above. ‘But what I learned from it is that in any emergency you have to act fast: find a life jacket, get yourself up to the boat deck and make your way into a lifeboat.’

      ‘But it was women and children first. It was much harder for men.’

      ‘That’s as it should be since we’re the stronger sex. But still, many more Titanic passengers could have been saved. The real tragedy is all those half-empty lifeboats that didn’t go back to pick up people in the water. I wonder how their occupants live with themselves?’

      Gerda was musing on what he’d said about being the stronger sex. It seemed men were stronger in their emotions as well as in their physique. She wished she could peer into Jack’s head and find out what he thought of her. For the last day they’d spent all their waking hours together so it must mean that he at least enjoyed her company. They never ran out of things to talk about. But had he taken a liking to her? Was he thinking of her as a possible future wife? She had no idea and itched to ask him.

      Suddenly they heard a scream and looked up. Two young children, a boy and a girl of maybe six or seven years old, had somehow climbed onto the outside of the railings surrounding the second-class promenade and were edging their way round, feet on a narrow ledge above a fifteen-foot drop. A woman had just spotted them and was rushing towards them shrieking.

      Jack sprinted across the deck so he was right below and shouted up: ‘Stay calm! Don’t startle them.’

      Ignoring him, the woman grabbed the boy’s arm and began to yank him over the rail. ‘What have I said to you about running off and leading your sister into trouble? I’ll box your ears, so I will.’

      At that moment, the girl’s grip loosened. She fell backwards without a sound, her skirts billowing. Jack caught her, staggered under the impact then fell onto the deck. The girl was uninjured, her fall cushioned, but she burst into tears of shock.

      Gerda hurried to help her to her feet. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked Jack and he nodded, brushing himself down and rising gingerly. She soothed the girl: ‘There, there; you’re fine. We’ll take you back to your mother.’

      ‘She’s not my mother,’ the girl cried. ‘She’s my governess and I hate her.’

      ‘That’s as may be, little lass, but she knows what’s best for you. You listen to her next time instead of following your naughty brother.’ Jack spoke kindly, with a twinkle that made the girl stop crying. ‘Here’ – he fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a couple of toffees wrapped in paper – ‘one for you and one for your brother. Try to be a good girl now.’

      He lifted her across the barrier on the stairs between second and third class, into the arms of the governess who instantly began to scold her and didn’t so much as thank Jack for catching her.

      ‘How rude!’ Gerda exclaimed when they were out of hearing. ‘You saved that girl from a broken leg at least, possibly worse.’

      ‘We’re СКАЧАТЬ