Jojo Moyes: Ship of Brides

‘No . . .’ Sanjay was gazing around him. ‘I don’t think this is the kind of place . . .’

The old woman shifted in her seat. She was now desperate for a drink, and the chance to stretch her legs. She would also have appreciated a visit to the lavatory, but the short time they had spent in India had taught her that outside the bigger hotels this was often as much of an ordeal as a relief.

‘I tell you what,’ said Sanjay, ‘we’ll get a couple of bottles of cola and stop out of town somewhere to stretch our legs.’

‘Is this, like, a junkyard town?’ Jennifer squinted at a heap of refrigerators.

Sanjay waved at the driver to stop. ‘Stop there, Ram, at that shop. The one next to the temple. I’ll get some cold drinks.’

‘ We ’ll get some cold drinks,’ said Jennifer. The car pulled up. ‘You all right in the car, Gran?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. The two of them sprang out of the doors, a blast of hot air invading the artificial chill of the car, and went, laughing, into the sunbaked shop.

A short way along the road another group of men squatted on their haunches, drinking from tin mugs, occasionally clearing their throats with nonchalant relish. They eyed the car incuriously. She sat in the car, feeling suddenly conspicuous, listening to the tick of the engine as it idled. Outside, the heat shimmered off the earth.

Mr Vaghela turned in his seat. ‘Madam, may I enquire – what do you pay your driver?’ It was the third such question he’d asked her, every time Sanjay was absent from the car.

‘I don’t have one.’

‘What? No help?’

‘Well, I have a girl who does,’ she faltered. ‘Annette.’

‘Does she have her own quarters?’

She thought of Annette’s neat railwayman’s cottage, the geraniums on the windowsill. ‘Yes, in a manner of speaking.’

‘Paid holiday?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not sure.’ She was about to attempt to elaborate on her and Annette’s working relationship, but Mr Vaghela interrupted.

‘Forty years I work for this family and only one week’s paid holiday a year. I am thinking of starting a trade union, yaar . My cousin has the Internet at his house. We have been looking at how it works. Denmark. Now, there’s a good country for workers’ rights.’ He turned back to the front and nodded. ‘Pensions, hospitals . . . education . . . we should all be working in Denmark.’

She was silent for a few moments. ‘I’ve never been,’ she said eventually.

She watched the two young people, the blonde head and the black, as they moved within the roadside store. Jennifer had said they were just friends, yet two nights previously she had heard her granddaughter sneak along the tiled corridor into what she assumed was Sanjay’s room. The following day they had been as easy with each other as children. ‘In love with him?’ Jennifer had looked appalled at her tentative question. ‘God, no, Gran. Me and Jay . . . oh, no . . . I don’t want a relationship. He knows that.’

Again, she remembered herself at that age, her stammering horror at being left alone in male company, her determination to stay single, for quite different reasons. And then she looked at Sanjay, who, she suspected, might not be as understanding of the situation as her granddaughter believed.

‘You know this place?’ Mr Vaghela had started to chew another piece of betel. His teeth were stained red.

She shook her head. With the air-conditioning turned off, she could already feel the elevating temperatures. Her mouth was dry, and she swallowed awkwardly. She had told Jennifer several times that she didn’t like cola.

‘Alang. Biggest shipbreaker’s yard in the world.’

‘Oh.’ She tried to look interested, but felt increasingly weary and keen to move on. The Bombay hotel, some unknown distance ahead, seemed like an oasis. She looked at her watch: how could anyone spend nearly twenty minutes purchasing two bottles of drink?

‘Four hundred shipyards here. And men who can strip a tanker down to nuts and bolts in a matter of months.’

‘Oh.’

‘No workers’ rights here, you know. One dollar a day, they are paid, to risk life and limb.’

‘Really?’

‘Some of the biggest ships in the world have ended up here. You would not believe the things that the owners leave on cruise ships – dinner services, Irish linen, whole orchestras of musical instruments.’ He sighed. ‘Sometimes it makes you feel quite sad, yaar . Such beautiful ships, to become so much scrap metal.’

The old woman tore her gaze from the shop doorway, trying to maintain a semblance of interest. The young could be so inconsiderate. She closed her eyes, conscious that exhaustion and thirst were poisoning her normally equable mood.

‘They say on the road to Bhavnagar one can buy anything – chairs, telephones, musical instruments. Anything that can come out of the ship they sell. My brother-in-law works for one of the big shipbreakers in Bhavnagar, yaar. He has furnished his entire house with ship’s goods. It looks like a palace, you know?’ He picked at his teeth. ‘Anything they can remove. Hmph. It would not surprise me if they sold the crew too.’

‘Mr Vaghela.’

‘Yes, madam?’

‘Is that a tea-house?’

Mr Vaghela, diverted from his monologue, followed her pointing finger to a quiet shopfront, where several chairs and tables stood haphazardly on the dusty roadside. ‘It is.’

‘Then would you be so kind as to take me and order me a cup of tea? I really do not think I can spend another moment waiting for my granddaughter.’

‘I would be delighted, madam.’ He climbed out of the car, and held open the door for her. ‘These young people, yaar , no sense of respect.’ He offered his arm, and she leant on it as she emerged, blinking, into the midday sun. ‘I have heard it is very different in Denmark.’

The young people came out as she was drinking her cup of what Mr Vaghela called ‘service tea’. The cup was scratched, as if from years of use, but it looked clean, and the man who had looked after them had made a prodigious show of serving it. She had answered the obligatory questions about her travels, through Mr Vaghela, confirmed that she was not acquainted with the owner’s cousin in Milton Keynes, and then, having paid for Mr Vaghela’s glass of chai (and a sticky pistachio sweetmeat, to keep his strength up, you understand), she had sat under the canopy and gazed out at what she now knew, from her slightly elevated vantage-point, to lie behind the steel wall: the endless, shimmering blue sea.

A short distance away, a small Hindu temple was shaded by a neem tree. It was flanked by a series of shacks that had apparently evolved to meet the workers’ needs: a barber’s stall, a cigarette vendor, a man selling fruit and eggs, and another with bicycle parts. It was some minutes before she grasped that she was the only woman in sight.

‘We wondered where you’d gone.’

‘Not for long, I assume. Mr Vaghela and I were only a few yards away.’ Her tone was sharper than she’d intended.

‘I said I didn’t think we should stop here,’ said Sanjay, eyeing first the group of men nearby, then the car with barely hidden irritation.

‘I had to get out,’ she said firmly. ‘Mr Vaghela was kind enough to accommodate me.’ She sipped her tea, which was surprisingly good. ‘I needed a break.’

‘Of course. I just meant – I would have liked to find somewhere more picturesque for you, it being the last day of your holiday.’

‘This will do me fine.’ She felt a little better now: the heat was tempered by the faintest of sea breezes. The sight of the azure water was soothing after the blurred and endless miles of road. In the distance, she could hear the muffled clang of metal against metal, the whine of a cutting instrument.