Maiden Voyage

NINETEEN

The beating of the Arcadia's engines might have been loud, and so might the laughter of the passengers and the warbling of the orchestra. But a little more than a mile away, in slanting nun that was now as fine and as drenching as the curtains of wet organza, there was no sound but the sea and the wind and the desolate puttering of an eight-horsepower petrol engine, as a man called Thomas Dennis tried to nurse it through the night.

Thomas Dennis was a scenic photographer from Dundrum Street in Dublin. He was a single man, but this afternoon he had put out to sea in his friend's twenty-one foot fishing ketch Drogheda, and taken with him an eleven-year-old boy named Sean Joyce. Sean was the youngest son of his next-door neighbour in Dundrum Street, a carroty-haired widower whose wife had succumbed two years ago to the effects of fourteen pregnancies, and who fervently and equally believed in the vision of St. Theresa and the joys of home-distilled poteen. Although Thomas Dennis was well-educated and artistic, a favourite among the womenfolk of Dundrum Street but considered a softie by the men; and although young Sean was obtuse and scruffy and illiterate, better at throwing cobbles at the Guarda than he was at his schoolwork, the two of them, Thomas and Sean, had become the best of friends. They rarely talked to each other. Theirs wasn't the kind of friendship that needed talk. But they were out almost every Sunday after Mass, walking the hills of the seashore, or the banks of the Liffey, with Thomas springing on ahead with his tiny spectacles shining, as he peered inquisitively about for scenes that might be suitable for commercial postcards, and Sean stumbling along behind with the tripod and the cape and the heavy No. 1 Conley View Camera.

Today, they had gone out to take views of the Arcadia as she lay at anchor. With luck, Thomas would be able to sell two or three pictures to the Dublin Examiner, or even the Illustrated London News. They had photographed the Arcadia's massive sides from all points of the compass, and then eaten five cheese sandwiches each and shared a pint bottle of Guinness. All of Mr Joyce's children had been brought up on Guinness, it was mother's milk to them, and so Thomas could scarcely object to the boy's thirst for the black porter, even though he was only eleven.

But Thomas had reckoned without the perverse summer currents and the turning tide, and without the Irish efficiency of the petrol engine, which worked "on and off, according', although according to what had never been explained to him. By the time it had grown so violently dark at seven o'clock, they had already drifted and sailed and drifted and floundered four or five miles south-east from Dublin Bay; and it was only now, at twenty after eight, that Thomas Dennis had been able to patch up the fuel-pump line with a piece of rubber cut from his camera bulb, and fix an approximate course towards the Irish shoreline south of Dun Laoghaire.

It was a night of tilting seas and unceasing, impenetrable rain. Sean sat under the Drogheda's makeshift canvas canopy and shivered in his thin sleeveless pullover and his knee-length flannel pants. Thomas, at the tiller, his brown tweed cap as wet and shapeless as a cow flop, his collar turned up, was obliged to keep taking off his spectacles and wiping them dry.

"It's not so far now, Sean," Thomas kept shouting. "I believe I can see the breakers already. You wait and see, we'll be supping hot soup by nine."

When he first glimpsed the lights of the Arcadia, he thought (with a jump in his heart of God-be-praised) that they were the lights of Dun Laoghaire. But then they disappeared behind the shifting grey scenery of the waves for a minute or two, and when they reappeared, they were so much closer that he realised they must be moving towards him, rather than him moving towards them.

He wiped his glasses again, and strained his eyes in the misty rain, and at last he worked out that the lights were moving diagonally towards him on his starboard bow, and then he saw the illuminated funnels and decorated masts that told him he was crossing the path of the Arcadia.

There, Sean! Do you see those lights?"

Sean squinted into the rain, and then nodded. "Is that shore, Mr. Dennis?"

"It's not the shore, my boy, but it's the next best thing. The Arcadia. That's what it is! Can you see her now? She was due to leave her mooring at eight, so she can't have sailed far! And that means we're nearly home and dry! Now look, will you? Isn't that a sight? You won't see a sight like that again!"

Up in the Arcadia's wheelhouse, Dick Charles was glumly wondering what he was going to do about Lady Diana FitzPerry. In the crow's-nest, the look-out, Frederick Cowles, was staring sightlessly at the rain and wondering if his wife had started labour yet. He wouldn't have been able to see the Drogheda even if he had been looking in her direction: the evening was far too misty, and the Drogheda was wallowing in the troughs of the Irish Sea like a wet pig.

Sir Peregrine had been quite right. From a small boat, the Arcadia was as easy to see as Harrods at Christmas. But what he had failed to consider was that if you were floundering around in a small boat, with the wind and the rain blowing steadily on to your port bow, and your eight-horsepower engine coughing and stuttering, and if Harrods were to bear down your port bow at more than eleven knots, accelerating all the time, you would be extremely hard put to get out of the way.

It took Thomas Dennis only three minutes after he first caught sight of the Arcadia in the distance to realise that she might be on a collision course with the Drogheda. During those three minutes, the Arcadia advanced on him by more than three times her total length, or half a mile. There was now less than half a mile of sea between them.

Thomas was gradually clutched by a tight and overwhelming breathlessness, the kind of feeling that he could only think of as sheer dread. He said, out loud, "Mother of God', but when Sean looked up at him he found that he could say nothing else at all. There was nothing he could have said that could possibly have helped. He knew Sean couldn't swim, because he had once tried to persuade the boy to take a dip at the Black Rock baths. Even though both of them were wearing lifejackets, Thomas doubted if a few pieces of crumbly cork and mildewed canvas could save them in a cold choppy sea more than two miles from shore. And there would be very little that cork and canvas could do to protect them from a 53,000-ton express liner that was now bearing down on them so rapidly that even if its captain had seen them, he would have been completely unable either to slow down or to avoid them.

Sean stood up, his hair spiky in the rain. "Look now, she's coming our way, Mr. Dennis!" he cried, in pleasure. "If I call halloo, will they call back? Will they stop for us, Mr. Dennis?"

Thomas opened his mouth in panic, and closed it again. The tiny fishing-boat dipped and pitched in the water, its engine sounding as ineffective as a wasp in a jelly jar. The tiller seemed to be quite useless, no matter how violently Thomas wrenched it over, and he suddenly thought of a nightmare he had once had of tumbling over a bottomless waterfall.

He heard dance music. He thought: Holy Mother, am I to die to the sound of dance music? Then his whole world seemed to be blotted out by the towering black walls of the Arcadia, and by the thunder of her diesels, and by the livid white spray that leaped up from her bows like shrouded ghosts leaping out of their ploughed-up graves. Sean screamed, a high piping scream like a girl, and then the Arcadia burst the Drogheda into tiny splinters, demolishing her as thoroughly as if she had been blown up with gelignite.

Up in the Grand Lounge, at that very instant, Sir Peregrine was kissing the hand of Princess Xenia of Russia. Although the impact of the collision was no greater than that of running through a raft of half-submerged logs, or hitting a large buoy, Sir Peregrine was almost psychically conscious of a tremor that wasn't right, a tremor that ran through the living hull of his ship and tingled his nerve-endings. He lifted his head with an expression of sudden uncertainty.

"Is there anything wrong, Sir Peregrine?" smiled Princess Xenia coquettishly. "Did you chip one of your teeth on my rings?"

There was laughter all around them. The orchestra was striking a up with a Charleston. Sir Peregrine frowned in the direction of the grand staircase, and said, "No, no, of course not. Nothing at all."

Rudyard Philips, a few feet away, caught the questioning look on Sir Peregrine's face, and wondered what Princess Xenia could have said to him to make him appear so distracted. Next to him, slopping champagne out of her glass, a dark-haired girl in a shimmering gold dress was giggling and honking like a goose, and saying, "Isn't that a scream?"

Right below the girl's wafer-thin French-made sandals, right below the dance floor, down beneath the layers of second- and third-class decks, of galleys and engine-rooms, right beneath the riveted steel plates of the hull itself, Thomas Dennis was being dragged bodily down the whole 960-feet of the Arcadia's keel, battered and jolted and already scraped as raw as a side of beef. He was still alive, and still conscious, and most horrifying of all, he knew what was going to happen to him. He had nearly three-quarters of a minute of being bludgeoned against the hull, nearly three-quarters of a minute of tumbling through the chilling turmoil of the seawater which flowed beneath the Arcadia's black and impassive length, nearly three-quarters of a minute of unspeakable pain. Then, he was going to have to go through the liner's screws.

Princess Xenia took a tiny crouton topped with Malossol caviar and smiled at Sir Peregrine archly. The orchestra's vocalist picked up his megaphone, and began to sing, "Carolina, Carolina, at last you're on the map... With a new tune, crazy blue tune, with a peculiar snap..."

Thomas Dennis, martyred with agony, opened his lungs to scream, and flooded them immediately with freezing brine. Stunned, drowning, frightened more than almost anything else of the darkness and the terrible feeling of all that black weight pressing him down into the sea, he tried to tell his soul to let go, let go! let me die before I reach the screws, let me sit with my head resting in the Virgin's lap, let me know peace before I have to face butchery.

There was a quiet knock on the door of Catriona's stateroom. Catriona said, "Alice, there's someone knocking," and at that moment Thomas Dennis" legs were chopped off at the thigh by the whirling blades of the Arcadia's Number Two direct-driven screw. The rest of his mutilated body was burst open and flung seventy feet away by centrifugal force. Nobody was looking over the Arcadia's stern counter at that time, and even if they had been, it probably would have been too dark for them to see the brief stain of red that touched the foam. Thomas Dennis had left a single veal pie in his meat safe at home in Dundrum Street, and that was to have been his supper.

It was one of the Arcadia's pageboys at Catriona's door, with a celluloid box tied around with pink satin ribbon. "It's for you," said Alice, tipping die boy sixpence and bringing the box across the room. "An orchid." She peered at the card, and smiled as she handed it over.

Catriona was almost ready now. She was just trying to decide whether she preferred the silver-and-diamond brooch with the pearls swinging from it like dewdrops, or the pierrot brooch in white gold and white enamel. She said, "Could you bring me another cigarette, please, Alice? I think my nerves are going to get the better of me. I'm so excited?

The orchid, pale violet and still sparkling with moisture, was from Mark Beeney. On the card, he had written, "For the girl of every shipowning millionaire's dreams. Respectfully, Mark."

"I think someone's rather stuck on you, Miss Keys," said Alice. "You know what orchids mean, don't you? Undying passion. If a man gives you an orchid, that's a sign that he's never going to let you go as long as he lives. Not until he gets what he wants, anyway."

Catriona untied the ribbon, and carefully lifted the fragile flower out of its celluloid box. She held it up to her cheek, and made big eyes at herself in the dressing-table mirror. "It's the same colour as my make-up," she said. "It matches exactly. Isn't that perfect?"

Alice was hanging up Catriona's discarded neglige. "Perfect," she agreed, and meant it, particularly since Mark Beeney had given her an envelope with $50 in it to tell him what eye shadow Catriona was going to be wearing that evening.

"Do you really think I ought to wear it?" Catriona asked Alice, pushing aside the stool of her dressing-table and standing up.

"Of course you should wear it," said Alice. "It's a compliment. It doesn't necessarily mean that he's trying to make up to you."

"I don't know," said Catriona, twirling around so that her evening gown spun out around her. "I think I shall leave it in a glass of water. Or perhaps I shan't even do that. Perhaps I shall just let it wilt. After all, if I actually wear it, he's going to think that I'm keen on him."

"Aren't you?" asked Alice, busying herself with Catriona's scattered jars of make-up, and thinking about her fifty dollars.

"Aren't I what?"

"Aren't you keen on him?"

"Well, of course I am. But that isn't the point, is it? I don't want him to think that all he has to do is buy me a diamond and ruby necklace, and send me an orchid in a celluloid box, and I'm his. That wouldn't do at all. No, I think that now is the time for me to be even more remote than ever. I think I shall ignore him all evening. My God, there are thousands of good-looking men on this ship. Well, hundreds. Well, there are some. But he has to fight for me. He has to be a knight in armour. Shining and gallant and ready to die at the drop of a hat."

Alice said, almost crossly, "It wouldn't be very grateful of you not to wear it, would it? After all the trouble Mr. Beeney's gone to."

"What trouble? He bought me an orchid from the ship's florist, that's all. He probably didn't even go down there himself. I expect his man bought it."

"But it's exactly the right colour."

Catriona picked up the orchid by the stem, and turned it around between her fingers. "Yes," she said, airily. "I wonder how he knew."

There was another knock. Alice answered it, and this time it was Edgar Deacon, in full evening dress, looking dark and grey-haired and rather saturnine.

"Miss Keys," he greeted her; and then, "May I come in?"

"Of course," said Catriona. "You can have a drink if you want to."

"I brought you this," said Edgar, offering her a white lily in a cellophane box, tied with a blue ribbon.

"Oh," grinned Catriona. "I seem to have one of these already. Une embarrasse da corsages. Mark Beeney sent me an orchid. Look."

"Oh," said Edgar, irritably. "Well, you'll wear this one, naturally."

"Why naturally?" Catriona teased him. "I'm not sure I like white as much as purple. White is so... sterile. Don't you think so?"

Edgar reached into his inside pocket and took out his cigarette holder. "As a matter of fact," he said, lighting up, "it isn't from me. It's from somebody else. Somebody who's interested in meeting you and getting to know you."

"Not Jack Dempsey, I hope?" asked Catriona. "I saw him this afternoon, on the promenade deck, and he looked so moody. I think I'd be afraid to say "good morning" to him, in case he decided to try out his latest punch on me."

Edgar said, "No, no. Not him. It's... well, it's one of the people who came aboard just now, from Ireland."

"O'Hara? From the bank?"

"Not exactly, no. Not O'Hara."

"Mr. Deacon," said Catriona, "I think you're being very coy at this particular moment, and I think I want to know why."

"Miss Keys, I am simply trying to be socially correct." There was a note of forced amusement in Edgar's voice, and Catriona knew that she had just managed to get the edge on him. He was abrasive and sly and calculating as an adder, and he wouldn't let her hold her advantage for long. But right at this moment he wanted something from her quite badly, and although she didn't know what it was, she knew that the only way she was going to stay in control of her own destiny was to keep him wanting.

"You're not sounding sweetly coy," Catriona retorted. "You're sounding deviously coy."

"I'm not sure that I know the difference."

Catriona pursed her lips in a mock-cherubic pout. "I just think that you've got things a lot more planned out than you've been telling me. You've planned my wardrobe, you've planned out every hour of every day. Now I'm supposed to accept a lily from a strange Irishman. Well, I'm not sure that I'm very stuck on lilies. They remind me of death."

"He's not Irish," said Edgar. "His name's George Welterman, of International Mercantile Marine."

"Oh. The people you want to buy up Keys."

"The people I would prefer to buy up Keys if we find that we are obliged to sell it."

"So you don't want me to offend him?"

"I would rather you didn't." Edgar removed his cigarette from its holder and crushed it out in a stainless-steel ashtray which was presided over by a naked stainless-steel nymph. "He's not quite as dashing as Mark Beeney, I'm afraid, but it's very important that he gets a good impression of us. It will be his recommendation that will go to the Morgan bank to raise the finance to buy us out."

Catriona picked up the lily between finger and thumb, and twiddled it around. "I don't even know if selling Keys would be the right thing or wrong thing anymore. We'll be talking about the only thing. If we can't convince our bankers that we're going to pull through, and especially if we don't win the Blue Riband, then we won't have any more alternatives left open to us; and that is why it is absolutely essential that we keep on the right side of George Welterman."

"I nope you're not using me as bait," said Catriona.

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"Well, you haven't promised him that I'm going to spend all evening with him, have you? The Houri of the Atlantic?"

"I did say that I'd introduce him to you."

"And that means I have to cut Mark Beeney?"

Edgar said a little impatiently, "Nobody said you had to cut him. You simply have to understand that, no matter how handsome he is, he isn't going to do any of us any good. He wants the Arcadia alone; and as far as he's concerned the rest of the fleet can go hang. You just think about young Godfrey Colehill when you think about cutting the rug with a chap like Mark Beeney."

"It really isn't fair," Catriona protested.

Edgar said, more gently, "I quite understand how you feel. But remember your father."

"I am remembering my father. All he ever did was to spoil my fun."

Edgar let out a laugh like a piece of dry toast. "You know something, my dear?" he asked her. "You're so much like your father I can scarcely believe it. If your father had been a woman, that's exactly what he would have told me, too. Well, it serves me right for underestimating the hereditary Keys character, doesn't it? All fire and charm and melodrama, hot one minute, cold the next; and as stubborn as a stableful of donkeys."

Catriona, who had her arms outstretched as Alice draped her white mink stole around her shoulders, said nothing. Edgar glanced at her and gave a slight and inconsequential shrug, as if to acknowledge that there was nothing else he could do. He picked up the discarded lily.

"Ill go and tell Mr Welterman that his corsage was unacceptable."

"Not really?" said Catriona.

"Well, of course. If you don't wear it, he's going to ask me why not."

"But he couldn't have expected me to, could he? I've never even met him."

"It was simply a gesture of respect, from one steamship company to another. It wasn't intended to mean anything else."

Catriona turned her head sideways. "Alice," she murmured. "Alice what shall I do?"

"Wear Mr Beeney's, Miss Keys, if I were you," Alice murmured back, as she straightened out the hem of Catriona's gown.

"Well, no, I don't think I will," said Catriona. "It's all too ridiculous. In fact, I don't think I'll wear either. You can tell Mr Welterman, or whatever his name is, that I have decided not to wear flowers at all tonight. I am not in a floral frame of mind. Alice, you can flush both of them down the loo."

Edgar raised a hand. "If that's the way you feel."

"Yes, it is. That's exactly the way I feel. I don't belong to anybody, -and that includes you."

"But you'll let me have a dance tonight?" asked Edgar, unexpectedly.

Catriona stared at him. For a long, oddly magnetised moment, their eyes were held on each other, as if each of them were trying to convey something far more than they could express in polite (or even impolite) conversation. Nigel had once said to Catriona, "There are some things that can only be explained in bed." When Catriona looked at the darkness in Edgar's eyes, she knew exactly what Nigel had meant. Could he really be "one of those', or was there much more to him?

What nobody on board the Arcadia knew at that moment, though, was that the tide was gradually washing the brutalised body of Thomas Dennis in to shore, and that, not far away, weeping with shock and desperation, a young boy called Sean Joyce was clinging coldly to a broken spar.