Maiden Voyage

EIGHT

Dottie tapped on Catriona's bedroom door and said, "Are you ready, miss? Mr. Deacon says you have to leave in a moment. No more than five minutes, he said."

Catriona had been ready for almost half an hour. She had been sitting at her dressing table staring at herself in the mirror and wondering who she was and whether she actually liked herself. She had drunk two large gin-and-bitters since teatime, and smoked three Craven-A cigarettes, and if it hadn't been for the fact that whenever she tilted her head her mirror image tilted her head, too, she would have been quite sure that it was some other girl in the glass altogether.

She had to admit that Edgar had arranged everything spectacularly. Since her return to Formby last week, he had brought a hairdresser around to the house to bob her hair; as well as a milliner with so a cloche hats that her bedroom had looked like a multicoloured mushroom farm; and a dressmaker who had brought her gowns of velvet and silk and crepe-de-chine, gorgeous evening gowns that floated as she walked, short day dresses in vivid Japanese prints, smart touring suits in French brocades, tennis skirts and sun-frocks and bathing costumes with designs by Pablo Picasso. There hadn't been time for Catriona to have her whole new wardrobe made to measure, but after a morning in which she had felt as if she were drowning in voile and rayon and marabout-trimmed velour, she had spent on the Keys Shipping account something approaching 3,200 pounds and she owned a lavish modern wardrobe which was going to take eleven trunks to pack.

Then there had been shoes—handmade pumps and high-heeled slippers in pink and purple and eau-de-Nil—and pocketbooks in everything from lizard to sequins. And jewellery—rhinestones and emeralds, paste and platinum, enamelled peacocks with rubies for eyes, zig-zags of lightning made out of pave-set diamonds.

Her pleasure and vanity, however, were both sharply reduced by her grief at losing her father. He would have adored to have seen her now; even if they would have argued over which dresses were too saucy, and which ear-rings were too ostentatious. It hurt her, too, to think that if her father were still alive, she might not have agreed to come at all: and yet there on the list of first-class passengers, in her father's own stubby handwriting, was the name "Miss Catriona Keys" nest to the number of her stateroom. Had it been optimism? Or pride? Or a fatherly knowledge that she would have said yes, after all?

She hoped very much that it hadn't been a premonition that he himself wouldn't be sailing.

It was Monday evening, just past six o'clock. The marmalade-coloured sunlight glistened through the cypress trees in the garden, and somewhere very far away a young dog was yapping. Catriona lit another cigarette and sat with her elbow on the glass top of the dressing-table, her eyes lowered so that her reflection in the mirror wouldn't see what she was thinking.

Her eleven trunks were already aboard, and Edgar had announced to the Press that if they gathered at Liverpool's landing-stage at eight o'clock tonight, they would have their first opportunity to photograph the fashionable young "Queen of the Atlantic'.

It was all so glamorous. Nigel would have called it "ritzy'. But she knew that it meant an end to her freedom, and even an end to herself—at least, as she knew herself now. She had already changed beyond instant recognition. She could have strutted past Nigel in Royal Hospital Road and he wouldn't have known who she was. At least she thought he probably wouldn't. She didn't feel like herself at all.

She went to the open window and stood there smoking, her right elbow couched hi the palm of her left hand, her eyes half-closed, watching the smoke stream out over the window-ledge.

There was another knock. This time it was her mother. She was wearing a black V-necked dress and two strings of pearls, and there a circles under her eyes. Dr Whitby had prescribed her some new sleeping pills, but she still woke up every night at three or four o'clock in the morning and walked around the house with her hair plaited, like Lady Macbeth in search of Cadbury's Cocoa.

"Are you ready, darling?" her mother asked. "I think Edgar's becoming a little restive."

"I suppose I'm ready," said Catriona. "If anyone is ever really ready, then, yes, I suppose I am."

him a lovely dress, you know," said her mother. "The grey silk and the white lace edging. Very respectful, but so becoming. And your hair!"

Catriona touched her short-cropped head. "I don't know," she said. "I think I rather miss my hair."

"But you look perfect. So pretty! Haven't they made your eyes up well? Oh, my darling, I so wish that your father could have seen you."

Catriona came over and took her mother's hands. "Mother," she said, "if father had been alive to see me now, I wouldn't have been here. It's one of those dreams that never could have happened, not even in dreams."

Her mother's eyes winced a little, and then she looked away. "You don't despise me, do you, for wanting you to do this?" she asked, in a reedy voice.

"Why should I? He was my father, as well as your husband. We both loved him, in our different ways."

"Did you love him, Catriona?" her mother asked, urgently.

Catriona smiled, although her smile was a little vague. "I think I did. I must have done."

Her mother took her hands away, like someone who has been forgetting herself. "We're going to bury him tomorrow," she said. The moment that the Arcadia starts out over the open sea, at three tomorrow afternoon, we're going to bury him."

Catriona went to her dressing-table and came back with a small gold locket. She pressed it into her mother's hand. "Tomorrow," she said gently "can you throw this on his coffin for me?"

Her mother's eyes blurred with tears. "What is it?" she said. "I don't think I've ever seen it before."

"I bought it in London, with money that father sent me for my birthday."

Fumbling because she couldn't focus through her weeping, Catriona's mother opened the locket. Inside was a small photograph of Catriona on a summer's day in Cambridge, taken a year ago. There was a lock of her hair, too, tied with ribbon. Then there was a carefully-cut oval of paper, on which Catriona had written, "To My Beloved Father, In Memory Of All The Happy Times We Had Together, And All The Times We Didn't, But Should Have, Your Only Daughter."

Catriona's mother closed the locket and then held her very tight. "I know that you'll make him so proud," she sobbed. "I know that, wherever he is, you'll make him proud."

Dottie knocked hesitantly at the door again, and said, "Miss? Are you nearly ready? Mr Deacon's getting worried that you might miss your Press appearance, and he says it's ever so important."

Catriona kissed her mother on the forehead, and then brushed her mother's tears with the tip of her finger. "I'll make him proud," she said, although behind those words her uncertainty was as vertiginous as a lift descending down a bottomless shaft.

Edgar Deacon was waiting tightly in the hallway in a black suit and a stiff white collar, his hat held behind his back. Catriona came down the stairs twice as slowly as she normally would have done, allowing the billowing sleeves of her dress to flow down all around her. She thought to herself: if Edgar is going to make me a queen, then I'm darn well going to behave like one.

"We have to be going," said Edgar, with a grimace of impatience. "This whole Press reception is timed like clockwork and I want to make sure it happens like clockwork. Besides, we have a little detour to make on the way."

Isabella appeared from the sitting-room, wearing a hat that covered her head like a black cooking-pot, and a lifeless dress of black rayon.

"It's about time," she said. "You really can be the most inconsiderate of people at times. I suppose you think you can keep God waiting on Judgement Day?"

Catriona smiled at her. "Aunt Isabella, when they exalt you into even a minor deity, I promise that I'll be more punctual."

"Baggage," snapped Aunt Isabelle, and bustled out of the front door so quickly that Edgar Deacon scarcely had time to open it for her.

"You look beautiful," said Edgar, although he sounded clipped and objective, as if he were complimenting an Anglo-Indian burra-mem begonias. "I'm sure the Press will love you."

"Well, we'll see," said Catriona. She waited while Lattice brought her coat, a black belted wool coat with a spray of diamonds on the lapel.

They left the house and walked across the gravel drive in the warmth of the evening. A laurel-green Rolls-Royce tourer with red coaching stripes was drawn up by the ornamental fountain, its engine warbling. Isabelle was already sitting in the back, her profile lifted in haughty disapproval. Edgar ushered Catriona inside, and then nodded to the chauffeur.

As they drove away from the family house down the long curving him, Catriona turned and looked back at the elegant grey 1860s facades, the grey Gothic chimneys, and the rows of bay trees like children's green lollipops.

"It's funny, you know," she told Edgar. "I never thought of this house as my home, but now I do."

Edgar, holding on to the braided silk hand-strap, smiled and said, "You were too much of a kind, you and your father, don't y'know. Too competitive. Now he's gone, I think you'll probably find that just about everything in your life will be very much more straightforward."

"Well, that's not a very nice thing to say," protested Isabelle.

"I wasn't trying to be nice, my dear," Edgar told her. "Just truthful."

Isabelle turned away, but managed to remark, "I still don't see why Tony couldn't at least have been asked to help."

"Believe me," said Edgar, "if the Arcadia had been a haberdasher's shop or a hardware store instead of an ocean liner, I would have called on Tony at once. But I had to select only those people who were suitable."

"If you think Catriona's suitable, you must regard the Arcadia as a floating house of ill repute', snapped Isabelle. Then immediately, flustered at herself, she said, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I'm just overwrought. What with your mother's weeping fits, and Tony ringing up all the time to ask what's going on, I'm afraid it's all got on top of me."

Catriona took Isabelle's hand and held it between hers. It was thin and scaly with eczema, like the claw of a bird. "You've done wonders, Aunt Isabella. Don't get ill, and spoil it all."

Isabelle took her hand away immediately. "I hope you don't think I'm ill. I'm not ill."

Edgar glanced at Catriona and gave her an almost imperceptible shake of his head, as if to say that she should leave Isabelle alone with her jealousy and her tantrums and her inexhaustible grievances against the Keys family. Catriona sat back on the soft velour seat as the Rolls-Royce carried them swiftly through the suburbs of Liverpool to the docks, and didn't try to speak to Isabella again.

On an angled sunlit corner, as they passed, Catriona glimpsed two barefoot children sitting on the curb, their cheeks fat with gobstoppers. A woman in a straw hat was just coming out of the doorway of a small shop, where posters in the window advertised Pear's Soap, Player's Navy Cut and Monkey brand soap -which was a sharp reminder to Isabelle of her husband's shortcomings.

"Now," said Edgar to the chauffeur, leaning forward in his seat.

"Down Breeze Hill, sir?"

"That's it, then right at Stonecroft Terrace, and pull up."

"We don't have much time, sir."

"We have time for this."

The Rolls-Royce drove down a steep cobbled hill, then turned into the top of a sloping street of narrow stone-fronted houses. These were the "backs', the small tied houses where so many of Keys employees lived: stokers and deckhands and fitters and welders. Edgar said, "Stop here, please," and the Rolls-Royce drew into the curb with a squelch of tyres.

"I'll not want to be waiting here too long, sir," said the chauffeur, inclining his head uncomfortably across the terrace towards a gang of small boys with patched and baggy shorts, who were whistling and shouting and kicking an empty tomato tin around on the pavement. "A motor like this is a red rag to scruffs like them. Last time I stopped in Bootle some little blighter rubbed a sheet of wet-and-dry all the way down the bonnet, begging your pardon."

"We won't be long," Edgar assured him. He waited patiently in his seat while the chauffeur walked around the car to open the door for him. Then he stepped down, and held out his hand to Catriona.

"I've never been down here before," said Catriona, and she rather wished that she wasn't here now. She stood in the late-afternoon sunlight smelling the curious aroma of coal fires, boiling vegetables, sweat, cats, and stale hallways. A man walking down the other side a with his hands in his pockets stopped and stared at her openly.

"Percy Fearson is really your man when it comes to a guided tour him," said Edgar. "But come with me; let me show you something."

They walked down a few doors, until they reached No. 17. There was a peeling maroon-painted door, left ajar to catch the last of the sun, and on the doorstep sat an old woman in a flowery-print housecoat, knitting with knobby arthritic fingers.

"Hello, grandmama," said Edgar. "Is Mrs Colehill in?"

"Hello, Mr Deacon, sir," replied the old woman, toothlessly. "Fine afternoon, sir. Good for me bones."

"Is Mrs Colehill in?" Edgar repeated, louder.

"In the back, Mr Deacon, sir. Beating the rug."

"Follow me, Miss Keys," Edgar asked her, and led the way through a narrow hallway with crumbling plaster and brown wallpaper that smelled of kippers and mould. Catriona glanced anxiously into the a parlour. There was a dilapidated sofa sprouting horsehair, and sheets of newspaper on the floor. Two kittens dashed from one side of the newspaper to the other. On the wall was a picture of Jesus smiling beatifically into the middle distance.

They walked through the kitchen. A single green-corroded faucet dripped stains into a sink that was beyond cleaning. On a shelf above the sink was the family's entire larder: a tin of Rowntree's Cocoa, a small jar of Marmite yeast extract, a half-empty tin of Hartley's him jam, a packet of tea, a saucer of cooking-fat, a piece of sweaty Cheddar, and a bottle of HP sauce.

Through the misted glass of the back window, Catriona could see a thin ferret-faced woman beating a worn-out rug with a carpet-beater. A small boy stood dutifully beside her, in a skimpy green sweater with holes at the elbows and boots without laces. A ten-month-old baby banged a wooden spoon in imitation of his mother.

Edgar called, "Mrs. Colehill?"

The woman stopped beating and turned to see who it was.

"Mrs. Colehill, it's Mr. Deacon. I told your Ernest that I'd stop by, just to speak to you. I've brought Miss Keys with me."

"Oh," said Mrs Colehill, flustered. She came into the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. The boy followed her, pinched and silent. "You should have let me know, I'd have had some cake."

She shook Catriona's hand, and bobbed a little curtsy. "I was ever so upset to hear about Mr Stanley," she said. "It was ever so young to go, wasn't it? We're all right sorry."

"Thank you," said Catriona, gently.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" Mrs Colehill asked them. "It won't take a minute to put the kettle on."

"That's quite all right, Mrs Colehill," said Edgar. "We have to get down to the pier in a very short while. I just wanted Miss Keys to meet some of the important people in Keys Shipping before she meets the ones who only think that they're important. Mr. Colehill is one of our riggers, Miss Keys; been at Keys for nine years, longer than I have."

"I suppose he's down at the landing-stage, seeing the Arcadia off," said Catriona. "He must be just as excited as I am."

"Well, he would have given his right arm to have sailed on her, seeing as how he worked so hard on her; but of course you couldn't take along every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wanted a free trip, could you?"

There was no sarcasm in her voice at all. Edgar reached out and held her arm solicitously, and said, "Tell Mr. Colehill not to worry. We'll find a place on the Arcadia for him sooner or later. And remember that Mr. Keys promised a one-pound bonus for every man who worked on the ship when she arrives in New York, and two pounds if she takes the Blue Riband."

"Well," said Mrs. Colehill, smiling respectfully at Catriona, "that'll come in handy. A pound's a pound, after all; and it isn't easy for anyone to make ends meet these days, is it? Don't think that I'm complaining, mind. Two pounds sixteen shillings the week is good money by any standards. There's plenty who have to make do with less."

Edgar nodded towards the pale young boy in the torn green sweater. "How's young Godfrey?"

"Making progress, thank you, sir. The doctor says he should be well enough to go back to school in a month or so, after the summer holidays perhaps."

"How do you feel, Godfrey?" asked Edgar sharply. Godfrey said nothing, but hid his face behind his mother's skirts.

Edgar smiled, and reached into his pocket for sixpence, which he held out to Godfrey as bait to come out into the open.

"Perhaps I should explain that young Godfrey was suffering from a severe case of rickets," Edgar said to Catriona, still smiling, still teasing the boy with the silvery sixpence. "It's quite common here in the backs; what with the lack of fresh air in the winter, and the poor diet that many of our lower-paid workers have to put up with. If only the company could afford to pay them more. But young Godfrey's condition came to your father's personal attention, and he paid for Godfrey out of his own money to be treated by a specialist in Manchester, and for a regular supply of fresh milk and cod-liver oil to be delivered here to improve his health."

Mrs. Colehill said earnestly, "If it hadn't have been for your father, miss, he might never have walked. As it is, he's going to be handy; but his Da says that he could always be a jockey, seeing as how his legs would fit around an "orse."

Catriona leaned forward and held out her hand. Godfrey watched her suspiciously at first, but at last he reached out with his own thin a hand and took it.

"It's been lovely to meet you, Godfrey," she said gently. "When I come back from New York, I'll bring you a present. What would you like more than anything else in the world?"

"Come on, chuck," his mother chided him. "What would you like for a present from America? Miss Keys won't buy you nothing at all unless you tell her what you want."

Godfrey cleared his throat, and then he whispered, "Raspberry junket."

Catriona said, "Is that all? No toys?"

"A lead sailor, if they do them, please."

"A lead sailor and a raspberry junket?"

Godfrey nodded.

Catriona squeezed his hand and kissed his forehead and said, "If that's what you want, that's exactly what you shall have."

They talked to Mrs Colehill for a few minutes about the baby, who was sleeping badly; but then Edgar took out his pocket-watch and said that they would have to be leaving if they were going to get to the landing-stage on time. Mrs. Colehill bobbed Catriona another curtsy, and then they left, and walked back up the street to where the chauffeur was zealously standing guard over the Rolls-Royce.

Edgar said, as they approached the car, "I expect you're wondering why I brought you here."

Catriona looked at him. "You said it was to show me who the really important people were."

"Yes, well it was. Well, partly. It was also to show you where your father always believed our responsibilities lay. You see, your father and I spent a great deal of time together. We became very tight chums, don't y'know, and I learned after a number of years what really made him tick. Apart from being a remarkable engineer, and a well-respected commander, he was also a philanthropist. He believed that his duty in life was to help the human race, rich and poor, and that no enterprise should be undertaken unless it eventually produced some ultimate benefit for the world as a whole."

Catriona said nothing, but waited by the open car door for Edgar to finish.

"The thing is, you see," said Edgar, "if we do have to sell Keys Shipping, we must think of families like the Colehills. If we sell it off piecemeal, then the Colehills and all the other people who live in these backs will be out of work. You have seen for yourself what a hard existence they have. Unless we make sure that Keys remains intact, and that the company keeps running, we will be condemning each and every one of them to indescribable misery."

Catriona said, "You never gave me the impression before that you cared very much about the shipyard workers. Didn't you once call them "the next worse scourge to rust"?"

Edgar gave Catriona a very thin smile, thin as a celluloid collar. "Just because your common dockside labourers are difficult men to deal with; untrustworthy, most of them; and none of them past wholesale thieving; that doesn't mean that one doesn't have a moral obligation to take care of them. Stanley, your father, saw Keys Shipping as a family, and in every family there are delinquents. That, however, does nothing to make it any less of a family, nor any less deserving of being kept together."

"We'd better leave now, sir," put in the chauffeur. "I'd hate to have to speed the last couple of miles, begging your pardon."

"Quite right," said Edgar. Then, to Catriona, "Shall we? I think it's time for the great adventure to begin."

"Peter Pan said that to die would be a great adventure," said Catriona.

"Well, that's J.M. Barrie for you," Edgar remarked, obtusely.

"I always saw myself as Wendy, as matter of fact," put in Isabelle.

"Wendy," said Edgar, "was skewered by an arrow." He gave Isabelle a bland and unreadable smirk. "Hardly a fate deserved by the most personable lady in the entire family."

"Hm," purred Isabelle, and looked across at Catriona to see what she thought of that.