Maiden Voyage

SIXTEEN

The Arcadia dropped her anchors off Dun Laoghaire, south of Dublin Bay, twenty-five minutes earlier than expected. The bay was crowded with dinghies and lighters and pleasure-boats, tooting their whistles and letting off firecrackers. The giant liner was 300 feet too long to be negotiated into Dublin harbour itself, and all her mail and passengers would have to be brought aboard by cutter, but that hadn't discouraged the Irish from giving her a noisy and cheerful welcome.

Sir Peregrine would have preferred not to stop in Ireland at all, but apart from being a political courtesy, the visit had been made imperative by the simple fact that Keys Shipping owed the Eire Credit Bank more than 400,000 pounds. Much of the Arcadia's steel plating had been bought with Irish money, on the understanding that she would dock regularly on her way to and from New York at Queenstown or Dublin. Some of the Irish bankers had actually tried to persuade Edgar Deacon to terminate the Arcadia's Atlantic run at Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, where ambitious investors of the 1860s had constructed a huge and lavish hotel in the hope that all transatlantic crossings would depart and arrive at Galway Bay. The hotel still stood, massively out of proportion to the small rundown town which clustered around it, but Edgar Deacon, with the blunt support of Catriona's father, had firmly resisted any suggestion that Keys Shipping might create a precedent and make use of it. "We might as well sail from bloody Oslo," Stanley Keys had growled.

Dick Charles stood by the rail as the Keys cutter, varnished and polished and flapping with celebratory bunting, came bucking and spraying out across the bay. On the Arcadia, by way of greeting, the brass section of the ship's orchestra had been mustered on the raised foredeck, and were playing "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" into the gusty breeze. The shadows of cumulus clouds moved across the sea like memories, and hi the far distance, over the dappled and densely green hills of Dublin and Wicklow, a half-rainbow rose as if by magic.

There was no seafaring tradition in Dick's family at all, and it always rather surprised him that he had become an officer on an ocean liner. He had been brought up near the sea, in Deal, on the south Kent coast, but his father had been a grocer, and his older brother Robert had gone into the Army catering corps. Dick had been a lonely boy, lonelier because of his impossible stutter, and the two most lasting impressions he carried of his childhood were of sitting on two biscuit tins in the dark hidey hole behind the counter in his father's shop drinking ginger beer out of a stone bottle and reading Tiger Tim's Weekly, and of walking out all on his own across the breezy marshes in his galoshes and his mackintosh to look for herons" eggs. The galoshes (which had been Robert's) had been far too big for him, and he had sometimes pretended that he was the giant in the seven-league boots.

Dick had been advised to go to sea by a senile careers master who had smelled strongly of urine, chalk, and bottled India ale, and who had lost all three of his sons in 1909 on the British steamer Waratah, which had disappeared on its way from Sydney to London with three hundred people aboard. Perhaps the careers master had seen Dick as a reincarnation of one of his boys. Dick never knew. But he had known that he didn't want to be a grocer, and so he had written to Cunard, White Star, and Keys, asking what he had to do to become a ship's officer.

He liked the Atlantic run, because in spite of his stutter and his bashful appearance, he was very sociable, and he always enjoyed the company of giggly young girls with too much champagne in them, and the loud bonhomie of wealthy and overindulgent businessmen. I Life on an ocean liner might be artificial—a community of two thousand strangers dancing and drinking and romancing and telling ridiculous lies to each other for four-and-a-half days—but it was a life in which Dick felt important and even glamorous. He wasn't as overtly lustful as most of the officers, who used to line the gangway at the beginning of each voyage, ostensibly to welcome the passengers on board, but in reality to size up their bunk companions for the coming few days. One White Star officer had already described the de luxe Atlantic liners of the early 1920s as "floating fuck-atoria'. But Dick had been through four or five quite seemly little affairs with girls he had met on board, and two of them still wrote to him. One, a dark-haired little co-ed from Creighton University in Omaha, always ended her letters by printing a scarlet kiss at the foot of the page.

On this voyage, of course, there were enough pretty and dizzy young flappers to bring even the most carnal of ship's officers to a standstill, or at least down to "slow ahead'. There was a party of twenty-six girls from Louisiana State, returning by second-class from a tour of Italy, half of whom were still giddy from the romantic attentions of Neapolitan romeos, and the other half of whom (ignored by the Neapolitan romeos) were grimly determined to win the romantic attentions of anyone, just anyone, before the Arcadia crossed the three-mile limit. There was a female dance troupe from Yonkers, sponsored by Happiness candy, who were on their way back from a tour of American troops in Europe. And there was a breathless, bare-shouldered, eyelid-fluttering, hotly frustrated abundance of businessmen's wives and mistresses, just aching to be taken into a secluded corner and shown the phosphorescence of the Arcadia's wake on a moonlit night in mid-Atlantic.

It was one of these women ('fallow Floras', the chief second-class steward always called them, since they had been ploughed in years gone by, but not recently) who was now brazenly admiring Dick from the promenade deck below the bridge. She was forty years old at least, but she had a delicate fine-boned face that had kept its freshness, and responded well to Exotica night cream. She wore a green cloche hat which matched her eyes, and a ankle-length raccoon coat, which she kept wrapped around herself in a way that suggested she was very warm in there, warm as toast, and wouldn't Dick like to be as warm as that, too? She had a spattering of pale freckles across her nose which gave her the appearance of impish innocence.

When Dick looked quickly in her direction, the woman smiled and gave him a squiggly little wave with her fingers. Dick blushed, and touched the peak of his cap in acknowledgement.

Ralph Peel, the second officer, came up behind Dick from the wheelhouse, his hands clasped behind his back. "Ho ho," he said, in a voice as thick as rubbed flake tobacco, "that one's taken a fancy to you. Now you're for it."

"You know h-h-her?" asked Dick.

"Course I do. You should recognise her yourself. Or p'raps you only read the Boys" Own Paper."

"Who is she?"

Ralph Peel came to the rail of the boat deck and happily folded his arms over it. He was a short stubby man from Portsmouth, Hampshire, with a face that was always glossy from shaving, and eyebrows that were so dark they looked as if he had pencilled them in with mascara. He prided himself on his sleek hairy chest, and his sleek hairy back, and his very sleek and hairy legs. Sir Peregrine had nicknamed him "the Performing Seal'.

"That lady," said Ralph Peel, saluting her cheekily, "is Lady Diana FitzPeny."

"You d-d-don't m-mean the Lady Diana FitzP-FitzP-'

"The same," Ralph Peel told him, with malicious amusement. "The one who was supposed to be riding half of the House of the Lords, and a good seven per cent of the Conservative Front Bench, while her husband was out in the Sudan trying to build railways for the dervishes."

"B-but she's w-waving at me," said Dick.

"So she is. And that's why you're for it. I warn you, Dick my boy, once a lady like that has taken a liking to you, you won't get away without giving her what she wants."

"Oh, d-dear," said Dick.

Ralph nudged him with his elbow. "I don't know what you're worrying about. She's not exactly a spring chicken, I'll grant you. But if half of the peers of the realm like her, and if seven per cent of Stanley Baldwin's lot think she's worth a go round the park, she can't be all that bad. I saw her photo in the Sunday Pic. Nice pear-shaped English upper-class lady, I'd say. Plenty to get hold of. You should enjoy yourself. Perhaps she'll teach you how to eat your peas off your knife without dropping them all down your shirtfront. You could do with a bit of class, you could. Now's your chance."

"God," said Dick, "you're absolutely incoh-incoh—"

"Incoherent?"

"Incoh—"

"Incorruptible? Incommunicado? In Korea?"

"Incorrigible," said Dick, at last.

"I don't know," Ralph Peel told him. "I just hope they never put you in charge of a ship when we have to make an emergency turn to port. Can you imagine it? "Hard ap—, hard ap—, hard ap—!" We'd be sitting on the bottom of the sea before you managed to say "hard a-porti" "

"My speech imp—speech impediment isn't all that bad," retorted Dick. "It only gets worse when p-people like you start r-ragging me."

Ralph Peel's smile widened with the contentment of a man who has all the authority he can happily handle, all the drink he ever needs, plenty of good food, a different woman every week, and one pound a day. He was-a man without any complexes whatsoever. He smoked, drank, danced with the lady passengers, and had the longest and most preposterous line about the time he had wrestled a shark with his bare hands in the swimming pool of the old Eximious (a freak wave having tossed it on board). To him, Dick's callow alarm at the attention he was receiving from the notorious Lady FitzPerry was a good broad joke. Wonderful. He couldn't wait to tell Monty Willowby about it.

"Can't you just picture it?" he said. "Big white wobbly thighs bulging out of shiny silk stockings. It's the real blue-blooded thing, Dick my lad. Education by Roedean, knickers by Harrods, wedding ring by Aspreys. She'll devour you alive and you'll enjoy every bite."

Dick glanced out of the corner of his eyes at the furry Lady FitzPerry, and she was still smiling at him. "I think I've got a heh," he said. Then, "I think I've got a heh," then, "I think I've got a headache."

Ralph Peel slapped him good-naturedly on the back. "You'll get over it," he said. "Or under it, eh? Ho ho."

"I suppose you're already fixed up," said Dick. "Well, you must be. I've never known you not f-fixed up."

"Well, to tell you the truth, I am," admitted Ralph. "A rather tricky little sheba from the University of Somewhere Boring, in the middle of America. Very cute. Blonde. Plenty of "It". But there are one or two more I've got my eye on. An heiress, one of them. Very tasty."

"That sh-should suit you d-down to the g-ground," said Dick. "Sh-she's full of "It" and y-you're full of sh—sh—."

Ralph slapped him on the back again. "Never mind, Dick. You'll get over it one day. Meanwhile, enjoy yourself with Lady FitzPee."

At that moment, Sir Peregrine emerged from the captain's sitting-room, which was next to the navigation room. At the same moment, Dick said, "Shit', and Sir Peregrine stared at him as if he were quite mad, and said, "I beg your pardon, Mr Charles?"

Dick turned maroon with embarrassment. He didn't feel any better when Lady FitzPerry waved at him again, a quick girlish wave, and called, "Coo-ee!"

Sir Peregrine said, with statuesque patience, "Do you think it might be advisable for me to go back to my sitting-room and come out afresh?"

By now, the Keys cutter from Dublin harbour had come alongside, and its passengers were coming aboard. As it turned out, there were only five of them: Denis O'Hara from the Eire Credit Bank, and his lady wife; Colleen Sullivan, the Irish singer, who had been booked to appear in the long-running Abie's Irish Rose on Broadway; the American golfer Jack Andrews; and a very tall fleshy-lipped man of about fifty who wore a broad-brimmed hat and a calf-length summer overcoat, and about whom nothing was announced. He spoke with a distinctive New York accent, that was all anybody could tell.

The newcomers were brought by Monty Willowby up to the boat deck, where Sir Peregrine shook them abstractedly by the hand, and wellcomed them aboard, and trusted they would enjoy their voyage on his little ship (Ha, ha), and invited them, with all the charm of a man who is trying to remember where he left his second pair of spectacles, to share his table that evening.

Colleen Sullivan, to Sir Peregrine's acute annoyance, then sang a very slow and very Irish interpretation of the original Charleston, flinging her arms out at every high note, and continually tossing her trailing scarf over her shoulder. Jack Andrews, who was spiffily dressed in patterned golfing socks, baggy knickers and a bow tie, took off his cap and pretended that he was taking a collection for her. "With a voice like that, who needs to sing?" he quipped.

Although nobody noticed him, there was a sixth new passenger: a handsome-looking middle-aged man with chestnut hair that had been allowed to grow rather longer than the fashion of 1924 dictated; that is, it actually covered the tops of his ears. He had appeared to be one of the tweed-jacketed journalists who had accompanied Denis O'Hara and the rest of the Irish passengers out from Dublin harbour. At least, he had carried a bottle of Guinness in one sagging pocket and a dogeared notebook in the other, and in Ireland that was usually sufficient to establish a man's credentials as a member of the press. But when the cutter was untied, and when it was steered back in a foamy semi-circle across Dublin Bay with its whistle piping, he was not among the journalists, nor the photographers, nor the smartly-uniformed crew of the cutter, with their peaked caps as level as the tops of letter-boxes, and their collars buttoned up to their chins.

He was, in fact, still on board the Arcadia. He was folded up, in the words of that week's Comic Cuts, like a cheap penknife, in one of the linen cupboards on the first-class cabin deck. The cupboard was smotheringly warm, to keep the linen well-aired, and he was sweating like a cheese. But he preferred the heat and the contortions to the prospect of facing his creditors in Dublin.

His name was Maurice Peace. He had been born in Smackover, in Union County, Arkansas, and he was a one-time prestidigitator, small-arms runner, singer of political songs, slack-wire walker, and meadow violinist. These days, however, he was a full-time gambler.