‘Wasted on you,’ said Frances.

‘Well, he knows that now,’ Margaret grinned, ‘so, anyway, he gets to ours, and he knocks on the door, and just as he’s stepping in, I’m screaming at Daniel about him not leaving all his clothes on the floor because I’m darned if I’m going to run around after him like Mum did. Poor old Joe’s standing in the hallway and me and Dan are going at each other hammer and tongs. Then Dad runs in, yelling that the cows have got out. Joe’s standing there, still in shock at the sight of me swearing like a navvy, and Dad grabs him and says, “Come on, lad. Look alive,” and hauls him out to the back.’

Margaret leant back. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was chaos. There’s around forty of them out and they’ve brought down one of the fences, and there’s two tearing up what’s left of Mum’s garden, so Dad’s beating them with a stick, tears falling down his face, trying to prop up Mum’s flowers. There’s Colm racing down the track in the truck, horn blaring, trying to head off the ones stampeding towards the road. Liam’s on one of the horses, acting like John Wayne. And then there’s me and Joe trying to corner the rest of them in the shed.’

She looked around the faces opposite her. ‘Ever seen a frightened cow, girls?’ She lowered her voice. ‘They shit like you’ve never seen. And where they’re wheeling around, it’s going everywhere. Poor old Joe is covered with it, top to toe, his beautiful shoes, everything.’

‘How disgusting,’ said Jean, raising a small smile.

‘And then, to add insult to injury, our biggest girl decides to make a break for it, and she goes straight over him. Don’t get me wrong, he’s no pushover – but the way she went into him it was as if he wasn’t even there. Bam.’ She mimed falling backwards.

Even Margaret, supposedly immune to the farmyard smell, had held her nose when she helped him get up, tried to wipe him down. She had thought he was swearing, but eventually realised he was saying, ‘The ring, the ring.’ The two of them had spent almost half an hour on their hands and knees in the cowshed, trying to find Joe’s token of everlasting devotion in the slurry.

‘And you – you still wear it?’

‘Cow dung included. To me that’s part of the romance.’ Then, as Jean’s hand went to her mouth, ‘Oh, Jean! Of course I washed it before I put it on. I had to do the same for Joe. My first evening as his fiancée was spent washing and ironing his uniform so that he wouldn’t get into trouble back at base.’

‘Stan asked me while we were at a dance,’ said Jean. ‘I reckon I was the youngest there – I was still fifteen. But it was lovely. I was wearing a blue shantung silk two-piece, it belonged to my friend Polly, and he said I was the most beautiful girl in the room. He’d had a few, but when they struck up with “You Made Me Love You” he turned to his mate and said, “This is the girl I’m going to marry. You hear that?” And then he said it louder. And I made out I was dead embarrassed but, to be honest, I really liked it.’

‘I’m sure you did,’ said Frances, smiling.

‘He was the first person to tell me he loved me.’ Her eyes glittered with tears. ‘No one ever told me that. Not my mum. Never even met my dad.’ She pushed her hair off her face. ‘Nope. I got nothing back there, nothing. He’s the best man I ever met.’

They had sat, in near silence, for almost half an hour more, Margaret calling to the traders to come closer, to take these back, bring those over. She had bought, at ridiculous cost, two necklaces for Letty, telling herself they would be a lovely gift, knowing it was a feeble attempt to atone. As the heat grew fiercer, and the sun moved across, taking their vantage-point out of the shade, she thought about moving. But no entertainments had been planned for the day, owing to the former expectation that they would be ashore, and the thought of them bickering with each other in the little dormitory was unbearable.

She was squinting listlessly at a small propeller craft humming towards them, the naval cap of its skipper, the clumsy grey shapes on board, watching them become increasingly distinct at it drew closer. She heard exclamations along the length of the ship as other women realised what it was.

‘Girls!’ she yelled. ‘It’s the post! We’ve got post!’

An hour later, they sat in the canteen, the normally cabbage-scented air now thick with anticipation, as a Red Cross officer collected all mail to be sent and distributed small bundles of letters from a trestle table at the end. The announcement of each name was greeted with squeals from the recipient and her friends, as if she was being called up to collect an award, rather than correspondence. Around them the windows were propped open to allow the sea breezes to penetrate the room. The light bounced off them, echoing the glimmering ocean low.

Jean had been among the first called to the table: her impressive seven letters from Stan had restored some of her vitality. She had handed them to Frances, who read them aloud in her low, sonorous voice, while Jean puffed nervously at a cigarette. ‘Did you hear that?’ she kept interrupting. ‘My name tattooed on his right arm. In two colours! And it hurt like buggery.’

Margaret and Frances had exchanged a glance. ‘And,’ Frances continued, ‘he’s won four pounds in a boxing match. He says the other fellow’s idea of boxing involved trying to block Stan’s punches with his nose.’

‘Hear that?’ Jean nudged Margaret. ‘Trying to block punches with his nose!’ If her laughter was a little too high to suggest genuine mirth, no one said anything. It was enough that she was laughing at all.

Later Frances would confide that she had left out several paragraphs: those that warned Jean to ‘behave herself’, and the story of a sweetheart deserted by one of his friends once he heard she had been ‘playing fast and loose’.

‘Margaret O’Brien?’

Margaret was out of her chair with a speed that belied her cumbersome frame. Breathless, she launched herself at the sheaf of letters proffered towards her, and returned, glowing and triumphant, her failure to get ashore forgotten. She wondered, briefly, whether she could go to the cabin and read them in private without causing offence. But just as she was about to ask, she heard a chair scrape back, and looked up from the envelopes to see Avice seat herself carefully in front of them.

There was a brief pause. Margaret, a little taken aback that Avice had chosen to seat herself among them after the previous evening’s quarrel, wondered if she might be about to apologise.

‘I’ve got news,’ Avice said.

‘So have I,’ said Jean. ‘Look. Seven letters. Seven!’

‘No,’ said Avice. She had a contained smile on her face, as if she harboured some great secret. It was a different Avice from the furious, tight-lipped girl who had left their cabin several hours earlier. ‘I have real news,’ she said, her chin jutting out. ‘I’m expecting.’

There was a stunned silence.

‘Expecting what?’ said Jean.

‘A baby, of course. I’ve been to the doctor.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Frances. ‘Dr Duxbury doesn’t strike me as . . . the most reliable . . .’ She thought of the last time she had seen him, singing blindly into a stores cupboard.

‘Oh, so nurses know more than doctors now, do they?’

‘No, I’m just—’

‘Dr Duxbury has taken a blood test, but in the meantime he asked me lots of questions and did an examination. He’s pretty certain.’ She smoothed her hair and glanced around, perhaps hoping to impart such momentous news to a wider audience.

‘I guess it makes sense,’ said Margaret, ‘now I think about it.’

The two other women looked at each other.

Avice couldn’t retain her composure. Her face lit up, cheeks pink with excitement. ‘A baby! Can you imagine? I knew I couldn’t be seasick. I’ve been yachting loads of times and that didn’t make me ill. Margaret, you must tell me everything I need to buy. Do you think they sell baby clothes in England? I shall have to get Mummy to send over all sorts of things.’

Margaret stood up and reached over the table to hug her. ‘Avice,’ she said, ‘it’s great news. Congratulations. How wonderful for you both.’

‘Strewth,’ said Jean, wide-eyed. ‘So all that seasickness was really you expecting?’ She looked genuinely pleased. Frances hasn’t told her of Avice’s betrayal, Margaret thought, and felt suddenly sad for her.

‘He thinks I’m already nine or ten weeks along. I was rather shocked when he told me. But I’m so excited. Ian’s going to be thrilled. He’ll be such a good father,’ Avice trilled, one slim hand resting on her flat stomach, already lost in a vision of future family life.

Margaret marvelled at her ability to wipe out the events of the past hours.

‘Stan got a tattoo of my name,’ Jean told her, but Avice didn’t hear.

‘I think I shall put in a special request to the captain to wire my family and tell them the news. I don’t think I can bear to wait until we reach England.’ Her name, called in clipped tones, echoed through the canteen. ‘Letters!’ she said, standing. ‘Letters! In all the excitement I hadn’t even thought – oh, you two have got yours.’ She looked at Frances, as if suddenly remembering, and said nothing.

‘Congratulations,’ said Frances. She didn’t look at Avice.

Frances’s name was called an hour later; it was almost the last, and cut across the canteen when the once-packed room was nearly empty. Margaret had thought several times about leaving them all to drink in Joe’s words in private, then re-examine them with the benefit of silence, but there was such bad blood between the other girls now, and Jean was still fragile, that she felt obliged to wait.

Avice had received two letters from her family, and two very old ones from Ian, sent only days after he had left Sydney. ‘Look at the date on them,’ she had said crossly. She had seemed to count it as a personal insult that Jean and Margaret had received more than she had. ‘Ian’s are nearly six weeks old. Honestly, you’d think the least the Navy could do is make sure we get our letters on time. How on earth am I meant to tell him about the baby if he’s going to get my next letter a week after we reach Plymouth?’

She studied the postmark bad-temperedly. ‘It’s really not on. I should have had lots more by now. They’re probably piled up in some godforsaken outpost somewhere.’

‘I think you were just unlucky, Avice,’ said Margaret, absently. She had reread Joe’s first several times now. He had numbered them thoughtfully so that she could read them in the correct order. ‘Hello, love,’ he had written. ‘Hoping by the time you get this you’ll be on board the Victoria. Couldn’t believe it when you told me you’d be on that old girl. Keep a lookout for Archie Littlejohn. He’s a radio man. We trained together back in ’44. Good chap. He’ll look out for you. Then again I reckon there’s not a man on board who won’t look out for you girls. They’re a good bunch on the Vic.’

Margaret gulped as his words became audible in her imagination, and thought of Joe’s trusting faith in the good nature of the men around him. She sneaked a look at Jean, who was gazing intently at Stan’s letters. ‘Want me to teach you?’ she asked. ‘While we’re on board? Bet we could have you reading by the time we disembark.’

‘Really?’

‘Nothing to it,’ said Margaret. ‘An hour or two a day and you’ll be a regular bookworm.’

‘Stan doesn’t know . . . about the reading. I always got my mate Nancy to write letters for me, see?’ she said. ‘But then I remembered when I came aboard that if anyone else writes them it’ll be in different handwriting.’