Survivor by Lesley Pearse Page B

her tears. ‘I don’t want to go to England. But they made
     me.’
    Mariette was beginning to feel
     claustrophobic in the small space; it was tempting to run out of the cabin and leave
     this great blubbering lump to sort herself out. But her mother had always impressed
     on her that she should help those smaller and less able than herself. The girl
     certainly wasn’t smaller, but she looked incapable of doing anything for
     herself.
    ‘Right, we’ll leave it all
     for now,’ she said. ‘Wash your face and we’ll go and get some tea,
     and you can tell me all about it. How’s that?’
    Stella didn’t even know how to
     pull down the folding washbasin; she just stared blankly until Mariette showed her
     how it worked. She showed no signs of being able to find a face flannel, so Mariette
     dampened the corner of a towel and wiped the girl’s face as she would have
     done to her brothers.
    ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘There might be some handsome
     sailors around. You wouldn’t want them to see you with a blotchy face, would
     you?’
    In the saloon, an hour and two cups of
     tea later, Mari had discovered the reason for Stella’s distress. She was
     twenty-four, both her parents had died of Spanish flu in 1919, when she was five,
     and she and her elder brother and sister had gone to live with their grandparents in
     Wellington. When her grandfather died, he had left all three children some money.
     Her brother and sister had gone off to England, leaving fifteen-year-old Stella with
     her grandmother.
    ‘I was intending to go to England
     and join them when I was twenty-one and got my money,’ Stella said. ‘But
     Grandma got sick just before that, and I couldn’t very well leave her.
     I’ve had nearly three years of doing everything for her, and it’s been
     awful, I can’t even talk about how bad it was. But then she died a few months
     ago, and instead of me being able to carry on living in her house and having a nice
     life again, I found out she’d left the house and her money to my uncle, and he
     wanted me out. He never did a thing for Grandma, hardly ever visited her, and he
     didn’t give a damn about what would happen to me.’
    Mariette viewed this story with a dose
     of scepticism. From what Stella had said, her grandmother’s house was large,
     with several servants, and so it was very unlikely she’d had sole care of her
     sick grandmother. In the short while she’d known Stella she’d learned
     enough to guess that the girl had led quite a privileged life. Perhaps her
     grandmother felt that as Stella had already been left money by her grandfather, she
     should build her own life, just as the other two siblings had done.
    ‘So you are going to join your
     brother and sister in England then?’ she asked.
    ‘That was
     my plan,’ Stella said. ‘But my brother wrote just a few days ago and
     said that, although I can stay with him for a couple of weeks, I’ll have to
     find a job and accommodation of my own. I don’t know how I’m going to do
     that, I’ve never worked.’
    Mariette tried hard not to smirk.
     ‘You could get a job as a housekeeper as you’ve experience of looking
     after your grandma,’ she suggested.
    ‘Oh no, I couldn’t be
     anyone’s servant,’ Stella said in horror. ‘I wasn’t brought
     up for that.’
    As Mariette made some small talk about
     the ship and some of the other passengers she’d seen, she studied Stella. She
     was no beauty, she had all the grace of a carthorse, and her duck-egg-blue dress,
     though clearly good quality, was dowdy – more suited to someone of Mog’s age
     than a girl of twenty-four. Her dark hair was fixed up in an untidy bun, but it was
     very shiny, and she had pretty hazel eyes. Now that the red blotches on her face
     were fading, Mariette could see she had a good, clear complexion too.
    There was a brooch on Stella’s
     dress that looked to Mariette like real sapphires and diamonds, not paste, and the