We Sink or Swim Together: An eShort love story. Gill Paul

only a few hours.

      ‘You want to watch it.’ Ellen narrowed her eyes. ‘Folks are already talking about how much time you’re spending together, like a pair of lovebirds. You don’t want to get a bad name.’

      Gerda was annoyed. ‘It sounds as though you’re jealous,’ she said, making Ellen huff indignantly and clatter her bedpan, muttering under her breath about decency and respectability.

      Gerda clambered into bed, pulling the sheet up to her chin. Her toes pressed against the wooden board at the end; at five foot six inches she was taller than average. Jack was a couple of inches taller than her and she worried he wouldn’t sleep well in such short bunks. She closed her eyes and waited for Ellen to finish her preparations and turn out the light before she let her thoughts wander freely.

      Jack still hadn’t said if there was a girl waiting for him back home, but surely if there was he wouldn’t be spending so much time with her? It wasn’t fair to give someone the wrong idea. She knew what that was like from bitter experience. But he seemed nicer than Alan Slaven … much nicer.

      Everyone had assumed she and Alan were engaged. They met when she was eighteen and stepped out together for the best part of two years, going for long coastal walks 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.