Maiden Voyage

NINE

They arrived at last at the landing stage, and the chauffeur nudged the Rolls-Royce through the tangle of taxis and wagons and jostling people until he reached the entrance to the terminus. A police constable opened the car door for them, and they stepped out on to a wide red runner. There was a smattering of applause from the pressing crowds all around, although few of them had any idea who Catriona was, or what she was doing here. Most of them were waiting to see Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Five or six Press cameras popped and flashed, and Edgar gripped Catriona's arm and muttered, "You have to smile. You have to look as if you're enjoying yourself."

Catriona managed a wave and a nervous smile. Then she was pushed unceremoniously through the terminus building to the main concourse, where there were flowers, and even more crowds, and a silver band playing "Goodbye, Dolly Gray'. Edgar led her forward to a cluster of stout smiling dignitaries, and there was the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, with his fur-trimmed robes and his chains, and he grasped her hand in his sweaty chipolata fingers, and raised it to his lips.

"I have to tell you how proud we are of the good ship Arcadia," he said. "Wherever she goes in the world, she'll carry on her stern the name of Liverpool—a fine ship from a fine city."

There was more applause, and the band tore into Land Of Hope And Glory as if they were trying to finish it in under a minute. Someone released a shower of coloured balloons, which filled the inside of the terminus and clung to the glass-roofed ceiling, although one or two of them escaped through a skylight, and fled into the bright summer sky. More cameras dazzled and flashed, and Catriona found that she was suddenly being rushed to the covered gangway that would take her aboard the Arcadia.

"Miss Keys!" the photographers kept shouting, holding up their plate cameras. "Miss Keys, this way please! This way!"

She was aboard the Arcadia before she knew it. She suddenly found herself being hurried up a wide staircase of sweeping semicircular stairs, lit by bronze statues of dryads with Lalique torches in their hands. The noise and the bustle were utterly confusing. Edgar stayed close by her side, but her vision seemed to be nothing more than a kaleidoscope of intense, excited faces, both men and women, and cameras, and running feet.

"Miss Keys!" they shouted at her. "Miss Keys, please!"

For a moment she was out on the promenade deck, and the warm evening wind was blowing in her face. But then Edgar had propelled her to her stateroom, and the door was closed on all those flashes and pops and all those eager, bright-red faces. There were two or three knocks, and something of a scuffle, but when Edgar shouted, "Go away! Miss Keys will be out in ten minutes!" the commotion seemed to die down.

Edgar came away from the door, his hands in his trouser pockets, smiling. "Well," he said, "what do you think? This is where the queen of the Atlantic begins her reign."

"I'm completely bewildered," said Catriona. "What happened down there?"

Edgar walked across the thick aquamarine carpeting to the inlaid walnut cocktail cabinet. "Would you like a drink?" he asked her.

"A gin-and-bitters."

He took ice out of a silver ice-bucket, and clinked it into two handmade Lalique glasses, with frosted stems in the shape of stylised nudes.

"What happened down there was your official civic reception."

"But it was like a whirlwind. I didn't even get the chance to say you."

"I didn't want you to have the chance to say thank you. I'm trying to make you into a queen, not the Lady Mayoress. You don't give speeches and you don't say thank you. You don't mingle. You take it for granted that you're the glittering star that all of these people want to see. Come on, that's how Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow do it. They keep that little bit distant from their public. They make people thirst for even the slightest glimpse of them."

"I see," said Catriona, taking off her hat, and laying it down on a polished onyx table next to her. Edgar brought over her drink and she swallowed half of it in one ice-cold gulp.

"This is all about mystique," Edgar said, in his most matter-of-fact voice. "You have a lot of it already, so you must know what I'm talking about. But at the moment, your appeal is what one might call a kind of "jazz-baby" cuteness. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not trying to be rude, it's very attractive in its way, and it sets a lot of chaps back on their heels. But you're going to have to develop yourself from there... give yourself more aloofness and style. Think to yourself that you're a queen, and you'll start behaving like one."

"When do we go to meet the captain?" asked Catriona.

Edgar smiled. "That's exactly what I was talking about. You don't go to see the captain, the captain comes to see you. After all, twenty-five per cent of the ship will soon be yours."

"Do you have some music in here?" asked Catriona.

Edgar raised a finger. Then he went across to what looked like a bureau. He slid out the front panel, and inside was a gramophone, balanced on gimbals so that it could be played even in rough weather. "What takes your fancy?" he asked her.

"Something soothing," she said.

While the thin clarionet warbling of Johnny de Droit filled the room, Catriona had a chance to look around. There were 385 first-class staterooms on the Arcadia, and every single one of them was decorated according to a different theme. Catriona's suite was "The Wind', and two entire walls of the sitting-room had been veneered with a ribboned pattern of bird's-eye maple and Cuban mahogany, to represent streamers flying in a breeze. There was a bronze sculpture by Bruno Zach in the centre of the long modern sideboard, a girl with her hair blowing out behind her. The furniture was all strictly modern, though eclectic: Italian-designed chairs upholstered with patterns of clouds, French tables in three different shades of blue glass, and a writing-desk of inlaid ebony, yew, and box, by Gordon Russell. On the wall was a Cubist print of "A Windy Day in Paris" by Gino Severini.

"You should see "The Jungle" stateroom," smiled Edgar, who had been watching her. "It has bamboo furniture, bronze palm trees, and a whole collection of porcelain monkeys."

"This is extraordinary, said Catriona. "I was expecting gilt and plush and stuffy old-fashioned furniture."

"That was what most of the Keys directors wanted," said Edgar. "You know what they're like. All tweed waistcoats and old-fashioned ways. But your father insisted that we should bring in the most advanced interior designers we could. This is the ship of the future, he said, we don't want it to be out-of-date before it starts. He didn't like half of the staterooms, not himself. They weren't to his taste. Most of them aren't to mine, either. But he recognised brilliant design when he saw it. He used to say, how can you expect a flapper in a short skirt to sit in a Louis Quatorze chair?"

Catriona put down her drink and walked through to the bathroom. There was a huge bath of solid Sicilian marble, as well as white velvet draperies, gold-washed faucets, and a multi-coloured mirror on the wall showing white mirror clouds blowing over a range of softly-curving blue mirror hills.

"I think it's amazing," she said. "You would hardly believe that you're on board a ship at all."

Edgar took out his pocket-watch and squinted at it. "The press should be ready for you in about ten minutes, if they're not queuing up outside already. I expect we'll have quite a few people from the shipbuilders and the company, too. Do you want to get changed now? I can send your maid in."

"Not just yet," said Catriona. "I just want to wallow for a while." She peered out of one of her portholes at the sparkling reaches of a Mersey estuary. The reedy jazz music made her feel like dancing around and around. She felt as if she must be dreaming, or drunk. There was a brisk knock at the stateroom door, but it was only the florist with a huge bunch of fifty white roses to symbolise the Arcadia's maiden voyage, and then more sprays of red and yellow roses and freesias, and orchids, than she could count. The sofa and the floor were knee-deep in flowers, Catriona could have waded in them, and their perfume was so heavy that she had to ask Edgar to open the porthole.

The telephone rang. Edgar picked it up and said, "Miss Keys" suite?" Then he covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said, "It's Sir Peregrine. He hopes you're comfortably settled in your stateroom, and he wants to know if he might come up to present you with his compliments?"

"Tell him to come up straightaway," said Catriona. "I feel like another drink before I get changed, anyway."

Edgar cautioned, "You shouldn't keep the press waiting for too him long."

Catriona lay back amongst the flowers, Ophelia amongst the orchids, and stretched her arms luxuriously. "Surely that's all part of this mystique you're trying to cultivate in me, being unpunctual. All the top film stars are late on the set. You know that."

Edgar gave a tight, impatient shrug, "It's up to you. As long as you don't overdo it."

It took Sir Peregrine Arrowsmith only four or five minutes to reach Catriona's staterooms from the bridge deck below, but in that time the restless newspaper reporters had managed to force open the door at least half-a-dozen times, and several of them had even tried to pop off "candid" photographs of Catriona as she sat drinking her cocktail. There had also been a ceaseless in-and-out traffic of beige-jacketed stewards, carrying in boxes of candies tied up with ribbons, bottles of Chanel and Guerlain perfumes, sugared plums, more flowers, jeroboams of Irroy champagne, silver trays heaped up with greetings, telegraphs, and a china doll dressed in the gold-buttoned livery of Keys Shipping Lines.

At last, Sir Peregrine elbowed his way in, and while Edgar forcibly closed the door on the newspaper reporters behind him, he stood tall and dignified as an old stork, brushing the gold-braided sleeves of his uniform. "A menagerie," he said, with trembling disapproval.

Catriona had met quite a variety of elderly men recently, mostly with Nigel. Theatrical producers, bankers, impresarios, and ageing princes of the footlights. By now, she'd grown accustomed to the nakedness of elderly men's fears. Unlike the young men she knew, who had all of their lives before them, and hadn't yet scraped the keel of their ambition on the unexpectedly shallow bottom of their own shortcomings, men like Sir Peregrine had become all too familiar with the precise measure of their limitations, and how little time was left to them. They betrayed their desperate anxiety that they might never be able to achieve anything worthwhile like signal flags.

She could tell that Sir Peregrine was considerably discomfited by having to leave the bridge and come up to her stateroom to welcome her, and that it rocked the security he felt in the traditions of the sea. On board a liner, the captain was the Absolute Presence, and even Catriona's father wouldn't have expected a man of Sir Peregrine's stature to have to jostle his way through crowds of reporters to a passenger's stateroom—whether the passenger was heir to the whole shipping line or not.

Sir Peregrine was numbered amongst those legendary liner captains like Sir James Charles, of the Aquiiania, and Sir Arthur Rostron. Sir James was a man of Brodignagian proportions who ran his dining table like Henry VIII, insisting on evening dress and full decorations at every meal, and directing the ship's orchestra to play Elgar while he led full-blooded assaults on citadels of pastry with moats of turtle stew. Sir Arthur, on the other hand, who had commanded the Carpathia when she picked up the survivors of the Titanic disaster, presided over a table which was noted for its severe regard of all the maritime proprieties, and its chilly lack of affability.

Handsome in the hollow-cheeked, cadaverous way that very thin men can be when they reach the age of sixty, Sir Peregrine was the last surviving son of the Marquis of Walburton. From babyhood he had irritated his father so much that at the age of fifteen he had been sent off to Portsmouth and apprenticed in sail. Unabashed, he had worked his way to his master's certificate and his extra master's certificate on the violent seas of Cape Horn and the Indian Ocean. He had joined Keys Shipping as fourth officer before the War, after seven years with Cunard, and had commanded the liner Samaria when she was a troopship. For the way in which he had sailed his vessel right into the Greek coast under fierce enemy fire in 1916 he had been knighted. Only his first officer had known that he was devastatingly drunk at the time; although when he was given the command of Keys Shipping's best liner, the Aurora, his determined way with bottles of Old Haitian rum had gradually become more noticeable—first to the management, and then to the passengers.

There had been two near-collisions, and then a frightening night when he had refused to heave-to against a storm that had wrecked half of the Aurora's superstructure and drowned three passengers. One morning he had failed to give a clear instruction from the bridge, and the Aurora had rammed the Keys Shipping Line pier at New York harbour at three knots, reducing its length by forty-one feet.

Several of the company's directors had fiercely opposed Sir Peregrine's appointment as captain of the Arcadia. But Sir Peregrine had allies in exalted places. His younger sister, Hattie, was married to Cecil, Duke of Ashurst, chairman of Maritime Finance, which had underwritten thousands of pounds of Keys debts; his closest friend, Roger Wellington, was one of the louder noises at Lloyds; and after entertaining the Prince of Wales on board the Aurora, he had regularly made up shooting parties at Sandringham. The pressure on Stanley Keys to appoint him master had been, in the end, irresistible; particularly since it was essential for the captain of a luxury liner to have high social ton. But privately he had made Sir Peregrine swear to give up the bottle.

The man most sharply disappointed by Sir Peregrine's appointment had been Rudyard Philips, the energetic young Welsh captain who had taken over the Aurora. Since the Aurora was presently in dry dock, Mr Philips was sailing on the Arcadia's maiden voyage as Sir Peregrine's first officer, but Sir Peregrine had made it transparently clear that he would put up with no interference and no quibbling, especially from a sprat like him.

Sit Peregrine's crustiness did little to intimidate Edgar, however. Edgar Deacon knew most things that went on in Keys Shipping and he knew just how heavily the commodore could drink. That was why Sir Peregrine had reluctantly answered Edgar's summons to Catriona's staterooms: he wanted to keep the Arcadia for himself and go down in history with a shining reputation for being a great and glorious master of the Atlantic. It was that fear, and that ambition, that Catriona had immediately sensed in him. "

"It's a considerable pleasure to have you aboard, Miss Keys," said Sir Peregrine with exaggerated formality, coming over and taking Catriona's hand. "I was, you know, a lifetime admirer of your father, and you have the sincerest condolences of myself and my crew. A sad, sudden demise. He should have been here today, so that he could have rejoiced with the rest of us."

"Thank you, Commodore," said Catriona. "Won't you have a drink? I'm having one."

Sir Peregrine, his cap wedged under his arm, glanced uncertainly towards Edgar, who was standing by the bar. Edgar shrugged as if to say that one drink wouldn't hurt.

"I'll have a mineral water, if you don't mind," said Sir Peregrine.

"Miss Keys caused quite a stir when she came on board," remarked Edgar, "I think she's going to bring us luck."

"I heard the ballyhoo," Sir Peregrine nodded. He took his glass of sparkling water and said, "Thank you. Let's drink to the Arcadia, shall we?"

"Arcadia," they said in unison.

"Sit down for a moment, Commodore," Catriona told him, and when he actually did, she was so pleased with herself that she couldn't hold back a smile. From being nobody more important than Nigel Myer's flapper girlfriend to queen of the Atlantic in one week was more amusing than she could have imagined. "Aren't you nervous?" she asked Sir Peregrine. "I would be, having to steer a ship as expensive as this, especially for the first time."

Sir Peregrine gave her an embarrassed grimace. "I have sailed her before, you know. She has undergone quite extensive sea-trials. So, I'm not quite as nervous as you seem to think that I may be. She's expensive, yes. But each liner has to be handled with equal care, no matter how many passengers she has aboard, and no matter how much she cost."

"Like the Aurora," put in Edgar.

Catriona raised an eyebrow. She had read about the Aurora in the newspapers. She looked at Edgar and suddenly began to understand that there was more behind Sir Peregrine's welcoming visit to her stateroom than the dutiful homage of an old company retainer to the bright new company figurehead.

"Well," said Sir Peregrine, "the Aurora always was a quirky old girl."

"What about the Arcadia?" asked Catriona. "Is she quirky, too?"

"Every vessel has her particular fancies," said Sir Peregrine. He wasn't looking at Edgar directly but he was obviously conscious of every move that Edgar made as he paced up and down the stateroom behind him. "The Arcadia lists very slightly to starboard, and probably always will do. But she's fast and lively and less inclined to roll than the Mauretania, or some of the Frenchies. There won't be so much seasickness on the Arcadia, I dare say; and since the carpets cost so much, that's probably just as well."

"I'm told that champagne is the best preventive against seasickness," said Catriona. Her mother had told her that, actually, the day before yesterday: drink as much champagne as you like, dear, but on no account eat ice cream.

"Champagne and silk pyjamas, that's what they say," Sir Peregrine asserted, and fixed Catriona with such a penetrating stare that she felt she had to turn away. It was almost as if he were trying to imagine what she would look like dressed in silk pyjamas, or even less. What a funny old bird he was.

"There's no sure cure, of course," put in Edgar. "Even aboard the greatest and grandest liners people get sick. The Berengaria's one of the worst: a very tender ship. I once saw sixty or seventy third-class passengers in a row, on board the Berengaria all being sick at once, like an orchestra."

Sir Peregrine stood up. "I'm sure Miss Keys doesn't really want to be disturbed by that kind of talk, Mr Deacon," he said. "But can I have a quiet word of business with you, before I get back to the bridge?"

"Anything you can say to me, I'm sure that you can say in front of Miss Keys," said Edgar, his voice very steady. "She's going to be more than just a figurehead, don't y'know. More than just a company mascot.

Sir Peregrine turned around and looked at Catriona, then back at Edgar. It was clear that he mistrusted Edgar in the way that he mistrusted submerged rocks, or icebergs. You could never be absolutely sure when you were going to glance against them, and have your hull ripped out.

"It's a personal matter, Mr Deacon," insisted Sir Peregrine.

"All the more reason to confide in Miss Keys," smiled Edgar coldly. "She has a very personal touch."

Sir Peregrine's string-like sinews tightened in his neck. "Perhaps this is the wrong moment," he said. "I'm sure Miss Keys must be impatient to meet the press, just as they are obviously agog to meet her."

"It's about Mr. Philips?" asked Edgar.

Sir Peregrine breathed deeply, but didn't answer.

"You know my feelings about Mr Philips already," said Edgar. "I have complete faith in him. Just as I have in you, of course."

"Mr. Philips," said Sir Peregrine, as if the name were two fairy-tale toads which came out of his mouth when he spoke, "is the kind of first officer who might well put his ambition before the safety of his ship."

"What does that mean?" asked Catriona, pointedly. She knew nothing of the rancour between Sir Peregrine and Rudyard Philips—in fact, she didn't even know who Rudyard Philips was. But she thought, as the heiress to Keys Shipping, that she ought to sound authoritative and sharp.

"It simply means," said Sir Peregrine, drawing up his pointed shoulder-blades so that his gold epaulets bristled, "it simply means that Mr Philips, in a moment of crisis, might conceivably put his career before the principles of good seamanship, and not assist me to the best of his ability. He might prefer to see me take the blame for any mishaps, and thereby enhance his own prospects of commanding this ship."

"You mean he might cheerfully allow the Arcadia to be damaged, and the lives of its passengers put at risk—just for the sake of showing you up in a bad light?" asked Catriona.

"It is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility," said Sir Peregrine, uncomfortably. He was aware that when they were phrased as bluntly as Catriona had phrased them, his insinuations against Rudyard Philips came close to the brink of absurdity. He looked to Edgar for some masculine support, despite what he felt about him; but Edgar did nothing more than smile into his drink, as if a witty remark had been written on the bottom of his glass. The spectacle of the apoplectic and seIf-righteous Sir Peregrine being hotfooted by a twenty-one-year-old flapper had made Edgar Deacon's day; he could have gone to bed without attending a single one of the pre-departure parties that were need for this evening, and slept content.

Now there was more band musk from the landing stage, and cheering, and the press started beating on the door of Catriona's stateroom with renewed urgency. "Come on, Miss Keys, we're going to miss the morning editions! We've got a train to catch with these pictures!" And so a Peregrine bowed to her, and kissed her hand with all of the respect that a seadog with all of his thousands of nautical miles and all of his hundreds of empty bottles of old Haitian rum might justifiably have accorded any pretty young girl with bobbed hair, big breasts, and long legs, and left the stateroom on an even keel.

"He's magnificent," said Catriona, really quite impressed, when he had gone.

Edgar was still squeezing the door closed against a reporter's arm. "Of course he is. It's his job to be magnificent. But he's also the biggest drunk on the seven seas."

"Ah," said Catriona; and it was then that the Press at last broke in and rushed to kneel before her with their notebooks and their flashing cameras and their excited questions, as if she were truly a newly-crowned queen. Dazzled, she looked at Edgar over the bobbing trilbies and the brilliantined heads, but all he did was raise his glass to her, and bow to his new memsahib.