Maiden Voyage

TWENTY-ONE

By the time the banquet was over, it was almost midnight, and the Arcadia had begun to demonstrate her own distinctive rolling motion for the first time. Actually, it was more of a roll—hesitate—and then a roll back again. Baroness Zawisza said, "This ship is a young virgin, you see... she can't make up her mind whether she wants to roll or not."

The seas, in fact, were preternaturally calm, and the Arcadia glided through them like an illuminated carnival float being wheeled across a dark and deserted plaza. This was just as well, since a fifteen-course dinner which had included filets de boeuf Robespierre, goose stuffed with chestnuts, sweetbreads a la Toulouse, and supreme of chicken with truffles was not likely to quell the sensitivities of anyone prone to seasickness. The meal had finished with strawberries, over which Mark Beeney sprinkled pepper. "It's something my daddy taught me," he said. "Pepper brings out the flavour of strawberries like nothing else."

There were several toasts. The loyal toast, to their majesties King George and Queen Mary. A toast to the financiers and the shipbuilders who had made the Arcadia possible. A toast to Catriona, and a toast to the Arcadia herself. There was applause and laughter, and the orchestra played "Pomp and Circumstance" to swell the breasts of the assembled company so that they matched their swollen stomachs.

Then Sir Peregrine announced one minute's silence in memory of Catriona's father, and sixty tables of first-class passengers stood with their heads bowed while Catriona herself closed her eyes and tried to remember those walks with her father along the dunes at Formby. It was five after midnight now, and the day of his funeral had passed. Tomorrow it would be a week since he had died. Catriona thought how irresistibly true that old cliche was, that time goes on, and leave the dead behind. She and the Arcadia and all of these hundreds of guests had already travelled into Wednesday, June 18th, while her father would be arrested forever at June 11th. "They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old."

In the second-class dining-saloon, with its pale veneered panelling and its stainless-steel motifs of mermaids, dinner had finished about a half-hour earlier, and the passengers were waltzing to the music of the Ted Bagley Sextet. The stewards served complimentary brandy (two-star) and complimentary cigars (King Edwards) to the gentlemen; while their lady wives were offered creme-de-menthe and Cadbury's chocolate mints (in comparison to the handmade pralines by Leonidas of Antwerp which were offered to the ladies in first).

Even deeper down in the social layer-cake, in the third-class saloon, the air was thick with cigarette smoke and the passengers were dancing a conga. The bar was serving whisky and ginger, port and lemon, and five different brands of bottled beer. But the singing was loud and cheerful, and streamers were unfurled all across the dance floor, and there were funny hats and red papier-mache noses, and hooters and squeakers for those who had drunk too much to do anything much more than hoot or squeak. In the opinion of the chief third-class steward, it was "a knees-up to remember'.

Harry Pakenow had spent most of the dinner talking to a French Communist schoolteacher with a harelip and a photographic memory of the works of Karl Marx. To this schoolteacher, the dictatorship of the proletariat was everything—that, and cassis, and Pont l"Eveque cheese, and his black-haired wife with her greasy forehead and smudged red lipstick. Harry, however, was not in the mood for discussing politics in any depth. Discussion was all very well, but it didn't win revolutions. Only violence won revolutions—swift and committed acts against the capitalist establishment. To what else would the rich pay any attention? But there was nothing Harry could say to this schoolteacher, with all his intense and recitative opinions about the distribution of wealth and the opium of the people—especially when Harry had already committed a political act far more telling than anything this poor man would ever manage in the whole of his active life.

There were thirty sticks of dynamite in the trunk of Mark Beeney's Marmon in the hold below the Arcadia's waterline, and to Harry that was the only political statement it was necessary for him to make. One bomb was worth a million leaflets.

With most of the steerage bumping and winding their way around the dining-tables in the conga, Harry went out on to shelter deck C and leaned against the rail with a bottle of Worthington and a cigarette. Although there was a south-westerly breeze blowing across the ship, the night was warm and unusually clear, even for midsummer, and the sky was bedecked with its own jewellery, the stars. To first-time travellers across the Atlantic, it was the sight of the stars at night that was the most breathtaking. They seemed so sparkling and so near that you could almost reach up your hand and feel them prickle against your fingers. And the ocean was so calm that, as the stars set, they were bisected by the horizon before they finally disappeared around the curve of the earth.

Harry leaned his back on the rail and looked up towards the first-class promenade, where young Lucille Foster had stood that afternoon to wave to him. He hoped that when the bomb went off, Lucille would find herself in the care of someone who wouldn't panic, someone who would take her immediately to the lifeboats. There was a high risk, of course, that some of the passengers would drown, but he very much didn't want one of them to be Lucille. He sucked at his cigarette until he was down to the raw hot smoke at the end; then he flicked it over the side.

He heard giggling in the darkness. He didn't take any notice at first, but then Philly came tripping out from the shadow of the electric winch which stood at the side of the deck, tugging along behind her a small blonde-headed girl with a button nose and wide brown eyes. "Oh, it's you," he said, with half a smile. "And this is your mate Lydia, I suppose."

"Didn't I tell you?" said Philly to Lydia. She was wearing a silver shimmy-dress, and as she giggled and wriggled the silver braid shone like Christmas decorations, or the fringes round a birthday-cake. "Isn't he cute? Lydia, don't you think he's just too cute?

Lydia held out a soft, damp little hand. "I guess he is," she said cheekily, and then burst into uncontrollable giggling again.

"I had you were seasick," Harry said to Lydia, swigging at his bottle of beer.

"I was," said Lydia. "It was too awful. Upchuck, upchuck, upchuck. I thought I was going to die. But I'm much better now. I think it him meat pasty I ate on the boat train. I don't know what the British put into their pasties. Minced dog, I guess. Well, maybe minced horse. But anyway, every thing's hotsy-totsy now."

"You girls should be dancing," said Harry.

"Oh, we don't care for the conga," Philly told him. "We only care for starlight strolls around the deck, you know the kind of thing. I guess you could call us natural romantics."

Lydia said to Harry, "You have a real runny accent, you know?"

"I've been living in England for four years, that's why," Harry explained. He finished his beer, and wiped his lips with the back of his sleeve. "It's a Liverpudlian accent, scouse they call it. It rubs off on you without you realising it. Same as their sense of humour. Do you know what they call coloured people? Smoked Irishmen."

Lydia giggled again. Harry held up his empty bottle and said, "Maybe we ought to write a message and toss it into the sea. Then some poor shipwrecked mariner on a desert island somewhere can swim through reefs and surf and schools of sharks to open it up, and find out what a good time we're having on this voyage."

"Didn't I tell you?" said Philly, rhetorically. "He's absolutely copacetic."

"Why don't you go join the party?" Harry told them. "All I'm going to do is watch the stars, drink another bottle of beer, and then go to bed. I don't think I have the same stamina those first-class people do. Maybe it's something to do with the first-class diet. Maybe caviar really is better for you than steak and kidney pudding. Or maybe they put something in the third-class beer so that we won't stage a mutiny."

Lydia said, "Hee-hee-hee-hee," as if she were a character in Little Orphan Annie, the new strip cartoon which had just started in the American funny papers. But Philly said, "Why don't you come down to our cabin? We have a bottle of giggle-water we bought in Calais, France. Real French grape brandy. We could play rummy and get spifflicated."

"Don't you have anybody else in your cabin?"

"There was another girl, Lorna, but she wanted to go share with her friends. They're all in the Perm State ladies" swimming team, or something like that. I guess they want to spend their time chewing the fat about swimming hats, or how to do the backstroke without drowning."

Harry thought for a long moment. What else was he going to do? Drink another bottle of warm beer? Go back to the cabin which he was sharing with two Lithuanian students and a German musician who seemed to carry all of his personal effects around with him in loosely-tied brown paper parcels? Return to the dining-saloon and dance the conga with all of those sweating choristers and cheap-suited shoe-salesmen and lady philosophy students with the curse? He felt inexplicably anti-social, unexpectedly critical of his fellow proletarians. How could they actually hope to overthrow the establishment when they were so easily pleased, when they were happy to dance the conga in a badly-ventilated lounge at the very bottom of the passenger decks, while up above them, in halls of glittering mirrors, the rich and the famous swept around to the harmonious sound of a whole orchestra? He took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose. He could already feel the dull ache of tomorrow's hangover.

"All right," he told Philly and Lydia. "Anything's better than doing the conga."

The three of them linked arms, and made their way across the gently-rolling deck. In the corners and shadows, couples were already intertwined, murmuring like doves before dawn; and on one of the hard varnished benches, with his arm around his black-haired wife, the French Communist schoolteacher was smoking a Caporal and earnestly denouncing Hegel. One man, who looked to Harry like a deserter from the Foreign Legion, stared out at the ocean and whistled a plaintive tune through his broken nose. He had the appearance of someone who has punched a great many people, both men and women, extremely hard, and might easily do so again.

There were four wooden bunks in Philly's cabin, as well as an upright washstand, which folded away when it wasn't in use, and a folding table which could be erected between the two lower bunks on the stiltlike leg. Three large pipes ran from one side of the ceiling to the other, and Philly was sure that one of them came from the second-class bathrooms, because every now and then it gurgled inside grew very hot. On the cream-painted wall, Lydia had stuck with chewing gum a black and white photograph of a grinning young man with very protruding ears and enormously wide trousers.

"Take off your coat," said Philly. "You might as well make yourself at home." She dug around under the mattress of her bunk and at last produced a half-bottle of pale brandy with the label Les Trois Mers. "Here it is," she said, unscrewing it, "although God knows why they call it the Three Mothers."

Lydia kicked off her shoes, hiked up her pale blue satin dress, and sat on the bunk with her legs crossed, like a little blonde elf. "I vote we drink the brandy, and then play spin-the-bottle."

"Who's the guy with the flappy pants?" Harry asked, hanging up his tweed sports coat behind the door.

"Oh, him. Lonnie McBride, one of my boyfriends. Isn't he spiffy?"

"In those pants, and with those ears, he looks like a strong wind might carry him off at any moment."

Lydia giggled. "You don't have to be rude. Well, not that rude. You ought to see him dance the Black Bottom."

Philly took the toothbrushes out of the glasses by the washstand and half-filled them with brandy. "Salut!" she said, lifting her own glass, clinking it against Harry's, and swallowing a huge mouthful. Then, watery-eyed, gasping, she said in a squeaky voice, "That's how they say cheers in France, did you know?"

Harry sipped his brandy more slowly. He didn't like it very much, but it warmed him more than beer. "At the rate you're drinking it, we should be playing spin-the-bottle in exactly'—he checked his watch—"three and a half minutes."

"Sit down," Philly told him, and then came and perched herself on his knee, tugging her shimmy dress up until he could see the lace trim around the hem of her knickers. "I just love your cheaters," she said, and kissed the lenses of his spectacles, leaving a bright pink a imprint of lips on each one. She was warm and she was wearing some cheap flowery perfume that Harry found, in spite of himself, to be unusually arousing. He didn't know if she felt him stirring beneath her, but she kissed him again, and then again, and the second time she kept on kissing him and wouldn't stop. Her tongue wriggled between his lips like a pink baby seal and lapped at his teeth. Gently, but provocatively, he bit it. Philly said breathlessly, "Ow."

"I hope you two don't think you're going to have all the fun," complained Lydia. "That's why I suggested spin-the-bottle. At least it's fair."

"All's fair in love and war," said Philly, greedily kissing Harry again. Brandy and saliva ebbed and flowed from Harry's mouth to Philly's mouth and back again, like the tide.

Bending forward, Lydia reached behind her and unhooked her gown, five hooks, one after the other. Then she struggled it off over her head, and threw it across the cabin. With a shriek of laughter, dressed in nothing but her camisole and her rolled-down stockings, she threw herself on Harry and started kissing him and nipping at his ears. Harry shouted, "Ah! That tickles! Get off! That tickles! Lydia, get off!" The three of them collapsed on the floor of the cabin in a struggling heap.

Laughing, protesting, he fought back. But it was a fight that he was too breathless and too tensed up to want to win. In the end, with whoops of triumph, the two girls unbuckled his leather belt (from the store where Janice worked) and dragged his pants off him. His dark red erection was already rearing from the fly in the front of his knee-length cotton-mixture undershorts. "Eureka!" cried Philly.

What followed took several hours: until the porthole was filled by first blue light of sunrise, as pale and as sensitive as the flags that grow in the water-meadows of Minnesota. It happened, for the most part, silently, like the flickering pictures in a zoetrope, and although it was erotic and sometimes plain dirty, it had a grace of its own which left Harry feeling tranquil and at peace with himself, and even at peace with what he had done, and was about to do. Lydia clambered on to him first, while Philly kissed him and bit him and unbuttoned his shirt. Under the arch of Philly's armpit he saw Lydia pull aside the leg of her camisole, and press his crimson erection against the damp blonde curls of her pubic hair. Then, with her own fingers, she slipped him inside her, and although she was as tight as a duck, she was also warm and wet and irresistible, and he let his head drop back on the rug, his eyes closed, while she bucked up and down, panting softly under her breath, a breathy hymn of practical ecstasy. Then Philly was at him, licking away with her furrowed tongue the juices of his struggle with Lydia, probing in places where no woman had ever probed him before, until he didn't know whether to be shocked or delighted. He thought to himself, who was it who talked about the rigid morality of the working classes? And then Philly was sucking at him so hard that he could scarcely stand the pain of it, the sheer thrill of it, the abandonment of it. There was more: Lydia insinuating herself towards him at four o'clock in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, the cheeks of her bottom spread wide apart in her own clutching fingers. Philly rousing him yet again and biting at his shoulder as he lay on top of her in a crowded few minutes of sweat and perfume, and was to prove the last ejaculation that he could manage. And then both of them cramming themselves into the bottom bunk with him, all thighs and breasts and bottoms, while he slept, or attempted to sleep, and the Arcadia rolled—hesitated—rolled beneath them.

But they were not alone, of course. They were not the only lovers. At that iris-blue sky was lighting up the windows and the glass roof of the Grand Lounge, Mark Beeney was dancing the last waltz of the evening with Catriona, slowly and elegantly stepping around the floor that was scuffed by dancing shoes and sticky with spilled champagne, amidst empty tables and trailing streamers and crushed flowers.

There was no sign of Marcia Conroy. An hour ago, she had gone back to her stateroom, swallowed three aspirin, and buried herself in her bed, too drunk and too stunned even to cry. Nor was there any sign of George Welterman. Discreetly, after one stiff dance with Catriona, and another with Princess Xenia, he had excused himself and withdrawn to his cabin. He had not gone straight to bed, though. At two-thirty in the morning, he had rung for his steward and asked for a glass of hot malted milk. At four, he had asked for more writing paper. As Mark and Catriona were waltzing around the Grand Lounge together, he was standing by one of the portholes in his stateroom, dressed in a maroon bathrobe, and smoking a cigar in an amber holder. His face appeared to be even more deeply engraved with lines than ever.