Maiden Voyage

TEN

After the reporters and the photographers had left, Isabelle came into Catriona's stateroom, unsteadier but happier from the effects of two vodka martinis, and from the compliments of a steward who had told her that she had the best legs he had come across since leaving Galway.

"That's what Tony always used to like about me," she said, sitting promptly on the sofa and blinking at Catriona from beneath the black rim of her cooking-pot hat. "My legs."

Edgar had been on the telephone for ten minutes, and at the end of his call he excused himself. "Apparently there's a problem with one of the turbines. Nothing that can't be solved, but I want to take a look. I'll call for you at ten, shall I, just before the reception party starts?"

Catriona went to the door with him. As he put on his hat, she said, "Is there more to you, Mr. Deacon, than meets the eye?"

Edgar looked back at her with a touch of a smile at one corner of his mouth, but his expression was really giving nothing away. "I'm not any more than I seem to be, if that's what you're trying to suggest. You're the queen and I'm your loyal and energetic subject. Also, I have a shipping company to run."

"But where does your sense of style come from? That's unexpected, in a businessman."

"My mother's side, I expect. My father was an engineer, my mother was a painter."

"So. You're a Leonardo da Vinci. Engineer and artist."

This time his smile spread wider. "I'd hardly say that. More like an Albert Ballin."

"Who on earth was Albert Ballin?" asked Isabelle, who had been leaning sideways on the sofa so that she could eavesdrop on their conversation.

"The creator of the old Hamburg-Amerika line," said Edgar, without taking his eyes off Catriona.

"He was very rich, Aunt Isabelle, and very dynamic, and quite unscrupulous," Catriona added. "I knew a man in London who had once played cards with him."

Edgar nodded to Catriona in mocking respect. "You're ahead of your years, Miss Keys."

"You're forgetting that I've spent most of the year with actors," she replied.

When Edgar had gone, Catriona rang for the steward to make them some more drinks, and for the maid to lay out her party dress for her, and draw her bath.

A steward on a luxury liner like the Arcadia virtually became for the duration of the voyage a first-class passenger's personal servant, and before the liner sailed tomorrow morning, Catriona would give him her full instructions for the following four days: when to wake her, when to bring her breakfast, what cocktails to provide and when, what parties and receptions she would be holding in her suite. Her maid she would give complete details of all her clothes, which gowns to lay out, how she liked her bath, how to arrange her dressing-table, which shoes to put out.

The steward turned out to be a brisk talkative man with black brilliantined hair as shiny as a painted newel post and the extraordinary gliding walk of someone who has been trying to keep trays of mulligatawny soup on the horizontal for more tilting, rolling, wallowing, and pitching sea miles than he can remember. His name was Trimmer, and he had served on Keys liners for nine years; before that, White Star. Before that, he had been a private In the Boer War, although he had shot nothing more spectacular than a pregnant hartebeest.

The maid was called Alice, after Queen Victoria's great-granddaughter, and was as small and pink-cheeked as a china shepherdess. She had worked in "several houses of note', she kept telling Catriona, "houses where the coals on the fires had to be set in your perfect pyramids, or else they'd make you take them to pieces and start all over again'.

"Has madam had a hopportunity to hinspect the vessel?" inquired Trimmer, pouring out Isabelle's third vodka martini with consummate skill.

"Not yet," said Catriona. "The inside of this stateroom is all I've seen so far."

"Well, if I might hexpress my hown hopinion, this vessel is a vision of loveliness," said Trimmer. "I don't think in all of my years hafloat that I never saw hanything so helegant."

"I'm looking forward to seeing it hall, I mean all, for myself," smiled Catriona, and then couldn't stop herself from giggling.

Once Trimmer had closed the door after him, she said to Isabelle, "I can't bear it! By the end of the voyage I'm going to be saying heverything with a haitch hon!"

Isabelle raised her martini. "It's the military, that's what it is. The military always speak like that. It's something to do with making yourself heard on a parade-ground."

Alice the maid came through from the bedroom and announced in her tinkly voice that Miss Keys" bath was drawn, and that Miss Keys" gown was laid out, and would Miss Keys be requiring the white silk stockings or the dove-grey or the pearl, but respectfully she herself would recommend the pearl, bearing the particular gown in mind.

"Aren't you going to go and get ready?" Catriona asked Isabella. "I mean, they have given you somewhere to change, haven't they?"

Isabelle's head tilted as if she were already at sea, instead of tied up at Liverpool's landing stage. "Yes, I've been given somewhere to get ready," she said. "A dinky little room with a washstand. But I'm not going yet. There's plenty of time for titivation. Plenty. Tony always says that I spend too long titivating. "For goodness" sake, Belle," he shouts at me, "stop that titivatingi You'll titivate yourself stupid, you will!" That's what he shouts at me."

Catriona glanced at Alice, but Alice had been trained in houses of note where the coals were set in perfect pyramids, and so her face registered nothing at Isabelle's outburst, neither approval nor mirth nor condemnation, but instead a kind of beatific preoccupation with life's busy little details.

Although Stanley Keys had been a very prosperous man, and the Keyses had always kept a reasonable array of servants—a chauffeur, a cook, three or four maids, and occasionally a butler—Catriona had never had a maid so completely to herself before, and never a maid who seemed to regard the slightest exertion on Catriona's part to be utterly out of the question. As soon as the bedroom door was closed, Alice began fussily to unfasten Catriona's buttons and to slip down her dress. Then, she gently but authoritatively ushered Catriona to the bedroom chaise-longue so that she could roll down her stockings. She seemed surprised that Catriona wore so little underwear. It was hardly the thing to wear nothing at all under one's cocktail dress but georgette step-ins. But, after all, Alice wasn't used to dizzy young girls from London. Her particular training was in the comprehensive corsetry of rich and gradually widening American ladies; or in the chemise-pantalons and voile pyjamas of indolent and fashionable Italiennes.

Alice slipped a silver silk peignoir around Catriona's shoulders and led her through to the steamy perfumed bathroom. There, for almost half an hour, Catriona floated and wallowed in constantly-replenished hot water, while Alice soaped her all over with pure white scentless French soap, rinsed her, and scoured the hardened skin on her heels (those pretty but shoddily cut shoes of hers!). Then, Alice towelled her, led her back to the bedroom, and laid out a manicure table.

"You can open the door now," said Catriona. "I'm sure my aunt's becoming rather tired of sitting out there on her own. And perhaps you could ring for the steward, so that we could have some champagne."

"Yes, Miss Keys," said Alice, and opened the door. There, on the sofa, her shoes kicked off, her legs hanging over the chromium sides, her eyes closed and her mouth wide open, lay Isabelle, asleep.

"I think the excitement's got the better of her," said Catriona, doubtfully.

"Is she travelling, Miss Keys?" asked Alice, completely unruffled.

"She's only staying on board tonight, for the reception parties," Catriona told her. "

"Well, that's probably just as well. She has the look, I'm sorry to no, of a poor sailor."

"Are you a good sailor, Alice?"

Alice sat down and took Catriona's hand in hers, examining the nails for overgrown cuticles and splits. "Sailing, Miss Keys, is like else in life. As long as it is approached with sufficient moral equilibrium, and a certain measure of liver salts, it can be borne."

Catriona watched Alice as she pushed back the softened skin of her cuticles one by one. "I'm intrigued," she said. "What else in life can usually be borne with the aid of moral equilibrium and liver salts?"

Alice looked up at her and batted her eyelids once. "Men," she said.

This evening, from ten o'clock until the first strains of dawn, there would be seven parties held all over the Arcadia in honour of her builders, her designers, and the men who had financed her (including a tall waxen-faced man in a wing collar from the Government, which had laid out nearly a million pounds for the building of the Arcadia on Stanley Key's assurance that in case of war she could immediately be brought into use as a troopship). Catriona, as the new head of Keys Shipping Line, would have to visit all seven parties, from the champagne fountain and seventy-piece orchestra in the main ballroom, to the beer-and-sausages bash that was being thrown in the third-class dining hall for the dockers" representatives and the boilermakers and the suppliers of Bisto gravy browning and cream crackers.

She had chosen a dress that was as original as it was erotic: a thin tracery of make-believe spiderwebs, sparkling with silver thread. A diamond encrusted spider clung to her left breast, and all the rest of the webs radiated from it. Its French designer, Antoine Claude, had described it as "a gown of shadows and suggestions, and nothing else, except perhaps a sudden unexpected revelation when you are least expecting it!"

Alice lifted the gown over Catriona's head as if she were lifting a cloud of smoke. The fine-textured fabric settled around Catriona's shoulders, and she twirled in front of the mirrors in the bedroom as Alice tried to scuttle around after her and fasten her hooks.

Catriona knew she was in a dream now. She had never seen herself look so startling. Her eyes were made up to make them look even darker and more slanting and more vampish than ever, her hair was glossy and bobbed like a wave of varnish. And the cobweb gown floated around her naked body like a mystery turned magically into a dress—concealing her one moment in layers of grey-on-grey, and then subtly showing the curve of an arm, the pinkish tint of a nipple, even a fleeting triangular shadow of curly hair.

She had always liked to dress to startle. She remembered when she was thirteen, coming downstairs to meet the bow-tied, party-frocked juveniles at her birthday tea with her dress tugged down to bare her shoulders in provocative imitation of Ethel Barrymore. Her father had been furious, but she had never forgotten the stir she had made.

"I must say," admitted Alice, in that curious unfinished dialect of the English domestic, "but it's hardly a mourning dress."

"I know that, I know that," said Catriona, turning around and around so that the gown hovered about her hi a smoky circle. "But my father wouldn't want me to mourn him, not tonight. He would have been as happy as a sandboy, himself, if he'd been here."

At a quarter after ten, Edgar came back to Catriona's stateroom, in full evening dress. He looked strangely less convincing in tails than he did in his normal business suit, as if he had recently arrived from Ooty hill station hi the 1890s; but charming, too. Isabelle had at last been persuaded by Alice to go to her little changing room on E deck, and so Catriona was sitting on her own, smoking, when Edgar arrived.

"I need scarcely tell you that you look ravishing," he said. "If I had wanted to dream up a queen of the Atlantic in my mind, I couldn't have done better. You're beyond imagination."

Catriona smiled. "I'm just myself, Mr. Deacon."

"Why don't you call me Edgar?"

She drew at her Craven-A, and then stubbed it out, still smiling. "I won't call you Edgar, because you're one of the employees of Keys Shipping. I wouldn't want people to think we were too familiar, would you?"

Edgar gave her a small shrug of acceptance, but she could tell that she had annoyed him. They were beginning to test each other's strength now, and Catriona knew that she was going to have to establish her authority quickly, or else he would use her as he had obviously intended to use her, as nothing more than a pretty puppet.

"Are we ready?" asked Catriona. "I think it's time I met everybody, don't you?"

Outside on deck, the outlines of the Arcadia had been traced in white necklaces of lights, and her bunting flapped in the warm coastal wind. A band on the quay was playing "The Floral Song', and the landing stage was jammed with glossy black limousines,—Humbers and Daimlers and Rolls-Royces. Beyond the docks, the whole of Liverpool sparkled in the summer night.

"I thought you might like to know that we've received a message of congratulation and God-speed from His Majesty," said Edgar, as he led Catriona to the doors that would take them to the Arcadia's grand staircase. "He also wished us to accept his deepest sympathies on the death of your Father."

"I should like to see that later, that message," said Catriona.

The promenade decks were packed with local dignitaries in white tie and tails, and their "lady wives" in long gowns and turbans and ostrich feathers. For the moment, however, the guests were all being discreetly held back from the staircase by red velvet ropes. Edgar nodded to the Keys Shipping officer who was politely but decisively heading off anyone who tried to slip down to the Grand Lounge for a surreptitious first taste of the champagne and smoked salmon, and the officer lifted the rope for them.

The loud conversation all around them immediately died away. The rope had been lifted! But for whom? Catriona found herself being stared at by hundreds of pairs of curious eyes; winked at by hundreds of diamonds in scores of necklaces; dazzled by a gross of starched shirtfronts. Then, at the prompting of a Keys officer at the back of the crowd, everybody started to clap, although most of them didn't have the faintest idea why. Catriona smiled and waved, as regally and as sweetly as she could, although underneath her flimsy dress her heart was running an hysterical bicycle-race. Two or three flash guns flared, and Catriona paused and turned by the open doorways to give the crowd one last theatrical display of teeth. She loved it, every moment of it. Her adrenalin was high, she felt pretty and bright and full of "It'. Now she knew why Nigel never tired of going out on to the stage every night, and twice on Saturdays. To be applauded, to be looked at, to have everybody whispering about you and wondering who you were—it was all too marvellous for words.

Arm-in-arm, Catriona and Edgar Deacon descended the staircase to the Grand Lounge. The staircase came down in a wide asymmetric sweep of semi-circular steps, each one cut and polished out of different-coloured marble. On either side of her, as she came down, Catriona could see herself a thousand times over, reflected and reflected again in tall fluted columns of sparkling mirrors.

Then they were in the Grand Lounge itself, and the orchestra struck up first with a fanfare of trumpets, and then with "Pomp and Circumstance'. The directors of Keys Shipping were all there, and the man from the Government, and a whole cluster of minor celebrities from sport, theatre and films. They stood up and clapped enthusiastically as Catriona came across the Lounge, and she almost felt like crying.

The Grand Lounge was brilliant. It rose the height of three decks, to an arched glass roof that was a glittering masterpiece of lightness and grace. Supporting the roof were twelve pillars of highly polished chrome, which mirrored every movement of the assembled guests in curves and stripes, and made the whole room flicker with life, like a film. Behind the pillars there were glass-and-chrome tables and chairs, and eleven fountains—naked stainless-steel girls, their arms stretched upwards, with spray surging out all around them to give the impression of undulating waves.

A table was spread with the most lavish buffet that Catriona had ever seen; and behind the table stood a starched rank of waiters and chefs in lofty white hats, ready to serve whatever a guest might wish, a hot country ham to rare roast beef, from hot and cold pigeon to smoked duck, from dry Indian curries with fresh nan bread and tandoori chicken to slices of pale Scottish smoked salmon. There was crisp-crusted cottage bread, still hot from the Arcadia's bakery; there was cheese from Cheshire and Cheddar from Lancashire; there were huge five-to-sixteen-pound marble pots of caviar, embedded in ice; there were fresh wood strawberries and cakes that were monuments in themselves, crammed with cream and nuts and fruits, and laced with kirsch.

The Grand Lounge's shining cocktail bar was as long as an American railroad car, and was ready with more than three hundred bottles of non-vintage champagne, as well as every cocktail imaginable, from a Blue Blazer (fiery whisky poured from one shaker to another) to the gentler tastes of Fish House Punch (rum and peach brandy).

The orchestra quickened its tempo to play "My Girl" and "Get "Em Again', and Catriona was steered around by Edgar to meet Lord Screpple, who leaned at an alarming angle and looked as if he had been boiled like a lobster, and the Marquis of Henrick, who looked distinctly underdone and had difficulty in catching the attention of the waiters. Then she had to shake hands with every one of the directors and senior management of Keys Shipping, almost every one of whom seemed to have watery eyes and a purple roadmap of Liverpool on his nose, and almost every one of whom pressed her hand between his, pressed it tight, and said how sorry he was, love, that Stanley had gone so suddenly to meet his Maker—but still, love, just look at you now, you're a successor and a half, better than a pound and a half of black pudding I'll say—and those watery eyes would strain to penetrate the cobwebs of her dress as if staring alone could melt them away.

"That's a fine lass, Albert. Just like her poor old Dad, what? But better-looking, eh?"

"I'll say. Can you take orders from a lass, though?"

"Who's talking about orders?"

After the first introductions had been made, Catriona was taken aside by a reporter from The Times who had arrived too late for the afternoon's press conference, a vague young man of about thirty-five with a dirty collar and breath that smelled of brandy. He asked her what she thought about Freud and she said she didn't mind his opinions but she wasn't particularly hipped on his taste in suits. The reporter licked his pencil a lot but didn't write anything down.

At ten-thirty, by a sequence of signals as subtle as any of those at a Sotheby's auction, the manager of the first-class restaurant, Mr. Dunstan Oliver, let it be known to the officers upstairs on the promenade deck that they might release the velvet ropes restraining the remainder of the guests, so that they too, could join the party. The orchestra played "Sons Of The Sea" as grandly as if it were the National Anthem, but there was still a rather noisy jostle on the staircase, and the lady wife of one of Liverpool's aldermen put her heel through the hem of her dress. Mr. Oliver, his profile raised like a circular saw, advanced smiling on the jostlers with an equally smiling escort of six headwaiters, and by the sheer intimidating glare of their teeth they quietened the commotion and directed everyone around the Grand Lounge to collect their buffet plates.

Catriona was talking to Lord Hinchcliffe and his daughter Elsie McKay. Miss McKay had been invited as a friend of the Arcadia's interior designer and herself designed interiors of liners for P&O. She wore a slinky butter-yellow gown and a yellow headband, crested by a huge diamond-and-carnelian clasp. "You just watch this mob," she said, in a brittle commentator's voice. "They're going to fall on all that food as if they were starving orphans."

She was right. As the orchestra played selections of Schubert from the year's most popular West End musical, Lilac Time, the guests crowded greedily along the length of the buffet table, elbowing and pushing each other, and leaving the end of the line with plates that were heaped as high as Egyptian pyramids with roast suckling pig, marinated sole, slices of rare beef, caviar and mayonnaise.

The hubbub of conversation, clattering plates, shuffling feet, and clinking glasses made the lounge sound, as Lord Hinchcliffe gloomily remarked, "like the eight-twenty rush hour at Babel railway station."

But to Catriona, the party was sparkling and funny and delightful. Despite the possessive way in which Edgar tried to pilot her through the throng, she managed to attract quite a crowd of sharp young men, one of whom was an outrageously handsome young Californian whose white teeth and white collar gleamed against his suntanned skin, and who made her promise to visit his family's orange groves in Bakerfield "as soon as humanly poss'. Another young man, English, and very thin, was a lyricist of popular jazz tunes, and just for her he composed on the spot a quirky little fox trot, which he accompanied with two teaspoons.

My, my, my sweet Catriona,

No, no, nobody can own her.

Like a dream

Or a song,

You can never

Hold her long

No matter how much tenderness you've shown her.

Apart from the posh young wolves, there were dozens of famous faces. Anybody with even a modest title who lived within driving distance of Liverpool was there; so were such diverse talents as Judge Basil Fuchs, business tycoon and owner of the Boston Braves; Helen Wills, the tennis champion; Princess Lowenstein-Wertheim, the lady aviator; Madge Bellamy, the motion picture star; and Sir Alan and Lady Cobham. Champagne corks were popped like artillery, and the sound of ice being rattled in cocktail shakers was shattering.

Still trailing her escort of attentive young men, Catriona was taken him the Grand Lounge to the first-class dining-saloon, where Sir Peregrine Arrowsmith was presiding with undisguised testiness over a party for the Arcadia's designers and engineers, and what he described as "a Mongol horde of advertising agents, licensed victuallers, and fiends of the popular press'. The buffet here was less imposing, although the dining-saloon itself was one of the most magnificent interiors that Catriona had ever seen: it was a modernist interpretation of the great hall at Mentmore Towers, the Buckinghamshire home built by Baron Mayer Rothschild, and it was hung with yards of Venetian tapestry, and lit by sparkling reproductions of the huge lanterns from the Doge's barge in Venice. All around the upper level of the dining-saloon was an open gallery, where guests in evening dress promenaded, drank champagne, and waved to their friends below. A string quintet played Schubert, although a jazz-band was waiting in the wings.

"Sir Peregrine," said Catriona, offering her hand.

"Miss Keys," replied Sir Peregrine, taking her hand and kissing it with exaggerated humility.

Edgar remarked, "Quite a jolly party you've got here, Sir Peregrine."

"I suppose the swine have to be fed," said Sir Peregrine.

"Swine?" said Catriona, looking around. "I thought these were the men who designed the Arcadia. It doesn't look as if she's been designed by swine."

Sir Peregrine cleared his throat uneasily. "Merely a humorous remark, Miss Keys. That's all."

"Oh," said Catriona, coldly. "A joke. Well, as long as the swine themselves don't overhear you."

Edgar tried to smile reassuringly at Sir Peregrine as he ushered Catriona away.

"You don't have to provoke him," he whispered to Catriona, as they made their way between the tables. "He's desperate to keep the Arcadia as it is."

"I'm just making it clear who's boss," said Catriona.

"To whom? To Sir Peregrine, or to me?"

"To both of you."

"Well, all right," hissed Edgar, clutching her arm more tightly. "But just remember that you have responsibilities, as well as privileges."

In quick succession, they visited three more parties. At the reception in the second-class dining-room, Catriona danced a frantic and hilarious shimmy with the man who had supplied all the Arcadia's sheets and bedspreads, and Edgar watched with humourless appreciation as the crowd of guests clapped in time to every bounce of her breasts under her cobweb dress. Young, vivacious, and unpardonably erotic, he thought. Much more captivating than he could have hoped, and far more enthusiastic about acting as a figurehead for Keys Shipping than he could have imagined. But troublesome. Wilful, aggressive, and unquestionably troublesome.

They had almost finished their tour of the ship's parties, and were making their way back along the starboard promenade deck by the open doors of the first-class verandah, when a slim young man in evening dress stepped out in front of them, and bowed.

"Good evening, old girl,", he said, brightly.

Catriona shrieked out loud. "Nigel!" she said. "How marvellous!" She threw her arms around his neck and danced around and around with him, to the amusement of the guests on the deck, who had all eaten quite enough quail now and drunk far too much champagne but the suppressed chagrin of Edgar, who hated surprises, and wanted everything to be tightly under control, including Catriona.

"What are you doing here?" Catriona asked Nigel. "I didn't know you had an invitation. I thought you were in London, sulking."

Nigel looked Edgar straight in the eye, although he addressed himself to Catriona. "As a matter of fact, old thing, I didn't actually have a legitimate invitation in the sense that I was actually invited. But the chap on the gangplank was a fan of mine. Saw me three times in The Road To Rome when we were touring. Said I was red-hot and asked for my autograph."

"This celebration is by invitation only," said Edgar.

"Oh, Mr Deacon, don't be so stuffy," Catriona protested. "Nigel would have been invited anyway, if I'd thought that he'd actually come. But you haven't been introduced. Mr Deacon, this is Nigel Mayers. Nigel, this is Edgar Deacon, the big noise at Keys Shipping. After me, of course," she laughed.

Edgar reluctantly shook hands. "I'm familiar with your work, Mr. Mayers," he said in a heavy tone.

"Well, if the Arcadia's your work, then I'm familiar with yours, too," said Nigel. "I must say she's a ripping tub."

Edgar momentarily closed his eyes as if to keep whatever feelings were boiling up inside of him well damped down. "Yes," he said; and then, "I suppose you two would like a minute alone together."

"If you don't mind, old chap," said Nigel. "Haven't seen the lovely Catriona for four days."

"Well, four days is a long time, sometimes," said Edgar. "Can you rejoin us in the Grand Lounge in five minutes, Miss Keys? I want you to make a presentation."

Catriona blew Edgar an impudent kiss. "Of course, Mr Deacon. Take care now. I'm sure that fat alderman's wife has an eye on you. I'd hate you to be eaten alive before we'd even cast off."

When Edgar had stalked off along the promenade deck, Nigel held out his arms for Catriona, and said, "Well? Is this the new you?"

Catriona took his hands, and gently squeezed his fingers. "I'm really surprised that you're here," she told him.

"Not half as surprised as I am. Once you'd gone, I thought to myself, that's it, she's gone for good. We're finished. But a chap can always change his mind, can't he?"

"I suppose so."

"Of course he can. Chap's prerogative. But the real question is, can a chap change his girl's mind, too? That's the real question."

Catriona looked at Nigel for a moment or two, and then released his hands. She went to the ship's rail and leaned on it with her arms folded under her breasts, watching the crowds of people who were still milling around on the landing stage. There was the mingled, discordant sound of music in the air, music from five or six different bands and orchestras.

"The fact is," said Nigel, joining Catriona at the rail, "the fact is that I have to admit that I love you."

Catriona reached out and touched his arm so lightly that he scarcely felt it.

"I can't force you to do anything," said Nigel. "It's not my way, anyhow, to force people to do things. I'm not that kind of a chap. But what I'm really asking is, well, is this the sort of life you actually want for yourself? All these steamboats and all these Good and Honest Folk in tweed? It just doesn't seem like you."

"The Arcadia's very glamorous," said Catriona. "Do you know that Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford are joining her tomorrow? And Princess Xenia of Russia? And Sir Alan and Lady Cobham are here tonight."

"You could just as easily meet all of those people in London," said Nigel.

"Not like this," said Catriona. "This is magical. And, besides, I'm a celebrity now. The young Queen of the Atlantic liners. Come on, Nigel, you know what it's like to be popular. I'm just finding out for the first time."

"Actually, it's very wearing to be popular," said Nigel, unconvincingly.

Catriona leaned towards him, and nuzzled her head affectionately against his shoulder. "I'm so pleased to see you. Don't let's start bickering."

"You mean that? You're really pleased?"

"Of course I'm pleased, chump."

"Then you'll come back to London with me?"

Catriona stared at him, her lips puckered in a held-back laugh, and shook her head slowly from side to side. "No, Nigel, I can't. But I won't forget you, and I'll always come back to see you if you'll still have me."

Nigel took a shallow breath. "Well," he said, plainly deflated, "I didn't really expect you to say anything else."

Catriona said, "You'll stay for tonight, won't you?"

"What for?"

"There are no trains back to London, not now. It's too late."

"I've got myself a room at the Royal Liverpool Hotel. It's not much. Faces a brick wall, actually. But there wasn't much available, what him this floating fun palace of yours about to depart. However, it'll do."

Catriona hugged him close. "Don't be so silly. You can stay with me. Come and join the party, have some champagne, and then I'll show you my stateroom."

Nigel eased his finger around the side of his stiff white collar. "Do you know something?" he told her, "I think this is the first time that a girl has actually seduced me, instead of the other way around. I would say that just about calls for a glass of champagne. Maybe two glasses of champagne. Or three."

"Then come and have some."

Inside the Grand Lounge, as they descended the staircase, the orchestra was blaring out "Pretty Soft For You', and the dance floor was whirling with shining evening gowns and black coattails. Catriona saw Edgar standing dark-countenanced among the directors of Keys Shipping, making no secret of his displeasure at Nigel's gatecrashing.

"Bit of a grim cove, that Edgar Deacon," remarked Nigel. "Want a dance before he rushes you off again?"

Nigel, despite his affected manners, was a strong and immaculate dancer. He took Catriona around the beautifully-sprung dance floor as if he were carrying her through a field of summer flags, around and around with their distorted reflections teasing and dazzling them from the lounge's gleaming pillars. She closed her eyes and listened to the music and the laughter, and somehow now that Nigel was here it all seemed like a fantasy. as if the only reality in the world were she and he, dancing.

She remembered (dizzily) drinking more champagne. She also remembered making a presentation of a silver-plated model of the Arcadia to some distant cousin of the King who had no chin whatsoever and ears like a woodland elf. She remembered dancing with the Lord Mayor, and with two or three fat and perspiring directors, whose bellies bounced against her like over-inflated footballs. But most of all she remembered climbing the staircase from the Grand Lounge to the rippling applause of everybody there, and then walking arm in arm with Nigel along the first-class promenade deck as the early-morning sun outlined the dark Gothic towers of the Royal Liver Friendly Society, and the Liverpool Pier Head, and sparkled on the Mersey as if gold sequins had been stitched on to every wave.

In her stateroom, Trimmer had left her a small tray with ice and seltzer on it and a fresh white gardenia. "Anti-acid for the hangover, flowers for the soul," said Nigel. "What an imaginative steward you have." In the bedroom, Alice had turned down the bed, both sides. "And your maid has an excellent intelligence network," Nigel added.

They locked the doors, and then Nigel put some sweet low jazz music on the gramophone. He took Catriona in his arms, kissed her, and unhooked the delicate catches of her dress. It fell away from her as softly as it had fallen on to her.

"Perhaps this is what I really missed," he whispered. "A chance to say goodbye to you the same way I said hello."

His right hand cupped the heaviness of her breast, and her nipple crinkled and rose the palest pink between his fingers. He tugged at it gently between his finger and his thumb. He kissed her again and again, and the tip of his tongue touched every one of her teeth, as if he needed to feel every intimate part of her before he lost her for ever.

Underneath his black evening trousers he was rearing hard and unmistakable. He peeled off his tailcoat, loosened his diamond cufflinks, wrenched open the buttons of his white vest, tugged free his necktie. Soon he was naked except for his white silk drawers.

The gramophone record came to an end and hiss-clicked, hiss-clicked, while the early sunlight began to illuminate the bedroom like a modern cathedral, all white drapes and lemon-wood and frosted glass. But as she lay back on the sheets, still wearing her rolled-down stockings and her dancing slippers, but otherwise completely naked, it was Nigel who filled Catriona's consciousness, and Nigel alone.

Nigel meant security; that little London love-nest for two. Nigel meant fun and freedom, but also closeness and friendliness and understanding, and waking up in the morning to find that someone you feel really fond of is lying asleep next to you. Catriona was brave and often arrogant, but not so brave or arrogant that she didn't miss Nigel's arms around her, or the simple days of making him cinnamon toast in that kitchen in Royal Hospital Road. She knew those days had inevitably passed; but this morning in her stateroom aboard the Arcadia she clung to them one last time.

Her eyes were closed as Nigel kissed her neck and her breasts, and his tongue ran up the curves inside her thighs. She caressed and squeezed his bony muscular shoulders and ruffled his wavy hair, and while she caressed him his tongue found every crevice of her and explored it both lovingly and provocatively. Something happened to her like a box Brownie closing its shutter in a moment of utter darkness.

Then he was astride her, and she reached up for him. He was pushing into her, forcefully but not roughly, and with an irresistible rhythm that made her feel as if the inside of her body was effervescent. lit seemed to go on and on, but not to last. He shuddered, and she held him tighter, the way you hold someone tighter when something has gone wrong, what's the matter, come tighter, come closer. But the tightness and the closeness was only her last desperate effort to cling on to him, knowing that once he had climaxed she would have to lose him.

"Nigel," she said. The word rose like a smoke-ring, and faded across the silent bedroom.

They lay side by side for almost an hour. They didn't say much. Then, without prompting, Nigel got up and dressed. Catriona stayed where she was, in bed, afraid to get up in case that made him leave all the more quickly.

"Have a safe journey, old thing," he told her. "Look me up when you get back. That's if you still want to."

Catriona's eyes were clustered with tears. She let out a long wavering breath, and then said unhappily, "I won't forget you. You know that, don't you?"

"Chin up, toots," he said, smiling.

"You could come, you know," she blurted out. "I could find you a stateroom, and you could come along too. My God, I'm the head of the whole shipping line. I can take along anyone I want to."

"Sorry," said Nigel. "It's back on the boards tonight. I only got away yesterday by pleading double pneumonia."

"But you don't have to go. It's only a play."

"My darling," said Nigel, "I said exactly the same thing to you. "You don't have to go. It's only a shipping line." But you knew that you had to, just as I know that I've got to. It's sad, and I'm going to miss you like hell, but it's the stuff that real life is made of."

The tears rolled down her cheeks. "How do you know what real life is made of? You're only an actor. Half the time you don't know what's real and what isn't."

Nigel took a clean linen handkerchief out of his coat pocket, shook it open, and wiped Catriona's eyes, as gently as he would have wiped a child's eyes. "You're probably right," he told her. "But the trouble is that I simply can't come with you, and you're not making it any easier for me to leave."

There was a sharp knock at the stateroom door. Trimmer's voice said, "Hit's breakfast, Miss Keys."

"All right," called Catriona, in a blotted sort of a voice.

Nigel said, "Do you want me to hide?"

She shook her head. "Don't be ridiculous. Come in, Trimmer."

Trimmer entered the stateroom straight-backed, wheeling a trolley that was draped in napkins. From underneath the trolley, he produced a bedtray, which he set up over Catriona, and which he proceeded to lay with an embroidered linen tablecloth, a silver vase containing a huge and fragrant Belle Blonde rose, silver knives and forks, a linen napkin, and then a plate of minced spring lamb and pickled walnuts, as well as tea and brandied marmalade and toast.

Nigel stood stock-still during this procedure, as if he were waiting upstage in Act Two of Emperor Jones. Trimmer passed him by as if he did not exist, the discreet and tactful servant. Catriona glanced at Nigel, but Nigel did not look back at her. Nigel was not actually hiding, but he was definitely playing the part of the unwelcome guest who had no lines to speak for at least another seven pages.

Just as neatly, however, Trimmer whipped away the ashtray and notepad from a small onyx-topped table beside the bed, snapped out a circular linen cloth, and set the table with knives, forks, tea, and another breakfast; and added, since Nigel was a gentleman, a copy of The Times, sharply folded.

Nigel reached into his tailcoat, took out his wallet, and without changing the utter anonymity of his expression handed Trimmer a pound. Trimmer bowed his head to Catriona, and said, "Henjoy your breakfast, Miss Keys. Helevenses in the Palm Court later." Then he retreated from the stateroom and closed the door behind him.

Nigel and Catriona looked at each other, and burst out laughing. "He's wonderful," said Nigel, lifting up his tails so that he could sit on the side of the bed and eat his breakfast. "The day we marry, and set ourselves up in a country mansion, I promise you that I'll hire him as butler."

Catriona was smelling her rose. "That's not a proposal, is it?" she asked him. Her voice was touched with sharpness.

Nigel reached into the breast pocket of his coat, took something out, and tossed it on to the cream-coloured bedcover.

"I was going to," he said. "But I've seen for myself that it won't work. Well, it was going to be my ploy for getting you back."

Catriona reached across the bedcover and picked up a diamond ring. It was only a small one, the kind you could buy in a chain jeweller's for less than twenty-five pounds. She examined it carefully, and the feeling of sadness inside a was almost painful, but somehow liberating as well. By proposing, Nigel had tied up all the doubts and anxieties and unanswered questions of their affair into one single question: a question which a single answer could decide.

When she answered, he nodded, as if he couldn't have expected her to say anything else, and picked the ring out of her fingers like a man plucking a forget-me-not.