Maiden Voyage

TWENTY-TWO

There had been many other encounters during the night: some fateful, some trivial, some downright ludicrous, but all, in their own way, dramatic. The inflated promotional brochures that Keys Shipping had handed out to the passengers of the Arcadia had made them quite aware of how much they were making social and maritime history; but all of them wanted to make personal history, too, to do something that they would want to remember for the rest of their lives.

"I remember the time I sailed on the maiden voyage of the Arcadia; I met this gorgeously handsome tennis player from Phoenix. We had four days and four nights of absolute heavenly passion. I sometimes wonder what became of him ... whether he ever won Wimbledon, or anything like that."

"I drank more champagne on that voyage than I ever drank in my whole life, before or since. I had champagne for breakfast, champagne for elevenses, champagne for lunch, champagne for tea. I even washed my teeth in champagne. After we docked in New York, I had a hangover that lasted for two weeks."

"I fell in love on the Arcadia. The man I fell in love with was your father. His Christian name was Jack. I forget his other name."

Mr. Joe Kretchmer, the president of the Wisconsin & Agricultural Insurance Company, a short, bald, good-humoured man with an hilarious line in Wisconsin Polack stories, fatefully became acquainted with Mr Duncan Wilkes, a newspaper owner from Anderson, Indiana. Mr. Wilkes was six foot four tall, slow-talking, with blond eyelashes like a large white pig, and fleshy ears that shone scarlet when the sun got behind them. His newspapers were crowded with columns of flower shows, funerals, and small advertisements. "You sell a newspaper to a small community by telling that small community all about itself," he remarked. "If you printed nothing more than the electoral register every week, you'd have a steady guaranteed sale."

Mr. Kretchmer and Mr. Wilkes had very little in common. Mr. Kretchmer loved his wife and his family of five daughters and most of all he loved horses. Mr. Wilkes was an unrepentant misogynist to whom the very word "lingerie" was something vaguely nauseating, and whose natural habitat was the smoking room, and the leather club chair. But both men, Kretchmer and Wilkes, were prodigious eaters.

After Mr. Wilkes had silently supped three plates of turtle soup, and then with an equal lack of commotion munched his way through five pieces of toast liberally spread with hare pate, and four dove breasts in aspic, Mr. Kretchmer reached across the dining table and tapped him on the back of the hand.

"You'll forgive my saying so, sir, but I do believe I'm looking at a gentleman after my own heart. Or should I say stomach."

Mr. Wilkes swallowed his last forkful of juniper-flavoured dove and wiped his mouth. "I care for my food, sir, if that's what you're saying. My late mother was one of the finest cooks in Madison County, Indiana, which was one of the reasons my late father married her. I was brought up on good food and plenty of it. My late mother's biscuits were like Paradise on a plate, that's what my late father used to say. "Renata", he used to say, "these biscuits are like Paradise on a plate." "

"Well, sir," said Mr. Kretchmer, "perhaps we ought to make a little wager between us, so that we both take advantage of all of the fine food on this voyage. Supposing I wager that I can eat every single item of every single meal that is served to the passengers between here and New York; and supposing I wager that you cannot."

Quartermaster Oliver Lennox, at the head of the table, said jovially, "That's a wager that you can never win, Mr. Kretchmer. I've seen the menus for this voyage, and you can take my word for it, a man would explode if he ate everything on offer. If you think tonight's banquet is something, wait until you see what we have for you tomorrow. A whole lamb in pastry stuffed with herbs, and breast of woodcock with orange liqueur."

"I'll wager I can eat a serving of everything," said Mr. Wilkes quietly, mopping up his plate with a bread roll. "I was intending to do so, in any event."

"Now, gentlemen," put in Quartermaster Lennox, "we don't want to turn this table into a gambling hell."

"Let them do it," said Lord Willunshaw, loudly from the far end of the table. "It's good for chaps to have an enthusiasm in life. Makes a change from all this postwar slackness we've been getting from the coal-miners and the civil service, and God knows who else. Let them do it! And I'll put twenty pounds on Mr Kretchmer."

"Yes, do let them," twittered Grace Bunyon, the stage actress. "I just adore to see people making pigs of themselves. It reminds me so much of those hysterical royal garden parties."

"Well, I'm not sure that I ought to," frowned the quartermaster.

"Damn it, man, they've paid for their food. You can't stop "em," said Lord Willunshaw.

"No, well, I suppose I can't," Lennox admitted. "In that case, very well."

Mr. Kretchmer stuck out his hand, and Mr Wilkes took it and shook it; a pink trotter clasped within a Neanderthal paw. "You're on," said Mr. Wilkes, in his quiet, quiet voice; and Grace Bunyon was to say later that she had never heard such a gently threatening voice in her whole life, not even when Herbert Beerbohm Tree played Othello.

Right then, the dining-stewards cleared the covers and brought on the sole in Pouilly Fume, the Spanish mackerel a I"Arcadia, and the sweetbreads a la Toulouse.

"Would you care for the sole, the mackerel, or the sweetbreads, sir?" the steward asked Joe Kretchmer.

Joe Kretchmer looked Duncan Wilkes straight in the eye, and said, "Yes."

Henrietta Chibnall, the daughter of Laurence Chibnall, the English champion show jumper, applauded loudly and squealed, "It's wonderful! It's too wonderful! They're both going to be frightfully sick!"

Another fateful encounter: a mild, amiable-looking man in a noticeably dishevelled dinner suit, his hands in his pockets, sauntered into the men's smoking room after the banquet was over and proceeded to stroll from table to table, nonchalantly but systematically picking up anchovy sandwiches and crackers spread with ripe Stilton cheese as if he hadn't eaten anything at the banquet at all. As a matter of fact, he hadn't, because no place had been set for him. He was Maurice Peace, stowaway and professional gambler, and he had only emerged two hours ago from the steam-heated sanctuary of the first-class linen cupboard.

A steward asked him if he would care for a drink. He thought about it for a while, his cheeks crammed up with cheese crackers like a ruminative rabbit, and then he said, "A half-bottle of Pommery and Greno Sec, if you don't mind. And perhaps a Welsh rarebit, with lots of cayenne pepper."

"You'll forgive me if I ask your stateroom number, sir," said the steward. "I don't appear to recognise you."

"Of course you don't recognise me," smiled Maurice, "I'm travelling incognito."

There was a difficult little silence. Then the steward licked his pencil and said, embarrassed, "Your stateroom, sir?"

Maurice leaned towards the steward and whispered, "B-mmph." Then, smartly swivelling around on the worn-down heel of his patent-leather pumps, he raised his arm in cheery greeting to the first man who came through the mahogany swing doors. "My dear fellow! I've been waiting for you!" he cried enthusiastically, and the steward, too concerned about the consequences of annoying a first-class passenger to press the matter of his stateroom number further, scribbled on the kitchen order, "B-13', which he happened to know was occupied by Mrs. Archibald Zuckerman, the widow of the recently deceased automobile tyre millionaire. Mrs. Zuckerman handed out five-dollar bills as if they were Salvation Army leaflets, and he was pretty sure that she wouldn't query her price of a half-bottle of champagne.

The man whom Maurice Peace had greeted so robustly was Mark Beeney, returning briefly to the smoking room to look for the cigarette lighter he had left there earlier in the day. He said, "Hello, old boy," in an abstracted way, but he didn't give Maurice the brush-off that someone with fewer friends and acquaintances might have done. For all Mark knew, Maurice might have been a regular American TransAtlantic passenger, and business across the North Atlantic was far too competitive these days to allow any shipowner to say the kind of things about his customers that William Henry Vanderbilt had once said about his railroad passengers—"The public be damned!"

Maurice Peace said, "A fine dinner, hey? A real fine dinner." The steward, moderately satisfied with Maurice's credentials, left the smoking room to fetch him what he had ordered. Mark Beeney lifted up one or two cushions, peered at the top mantelshelf above the fireplace, and said, "You haven't seen a gold and enamel cigarette lighter, by any chance?"

"Well, no," said Maurice. "But if it's been handed in, then the purser will have it. He's your best bet."

"I guess so," said Mark. Then, "Do I know you?"

Maurice Peace held out his hand. "We met in New York, about three years ago," he lied. "I don't suppose you'd remember me. I'm Maurice Peace."

"Mark Beeney," replied Mark, shaking hands. "Listen, I must say that I'm damned annoyed about that lighter. It had sentimental value, you now? I'm not usually one for losing things, either. Only money."

"You're a gambling man?" asked Maurice hopefully.

"I believe in luck, if that's what you mean," Mark told him.

"You're bidding in the ship's pool?"

"Of course. There isn't any chance at all that the owner of American TransAtlantic isn't going to bet on the distance the Keys flagship can travel in a day. No chance at all. Do you know what time they're bidding?"

"In about a half-hour, I gather," said Maurice. The time and location of the ship's pool was one of the few reliable facts he did have to hand, having accosted one of the smoking room stewards almost as soon as he had managed to struggle out of the linen closet. This was because more money rode on the outcome of the ship's pool than almost any other gambling event aboard, with the exception of some very humourless and long-running card schools, and some notably eccentric wagers. The ship's pool was the nightly auction of twelve potentially winning numbers, and it was conducted in the smoking room by the officers of the ship and a celebrity auctioneer, picked from the passengers. The numbers were determined by the first officer, and represented a field of ten estimated mileages for the next day's steaming, plus "low field" and "high field'. If the Arcadia was running at twenty-six knots, she could reasonably be expected to sail 624 nautical miles in twenty-four hours, from noon to noon, and therefore the numbers 619 through 629 would be auctioned—with "high field" to cover the possibility of the shipping company ordering extra speed and "low field" to take care of any possible engine breakdowns or bad weather. When there was a particularly persuasive auctioneer in charge of the proceedings, the pool could frequently exceed 1,000 pounds which in 1924 was worth almost $5,000. For $7,000, you could buy a brand-new custom-built Pierce-Arrow two-seater runabout.

"Well, I'd better get back to the dancing," said Mark. "Maybe I'll see you later."

"You want a private wager on the mileage?" asked Maurice.

Mark, halfway through the smoking-room door, turned and looked at Maurice narrowly. He was quite sure he had seen him before, but the time and the place completely escaped him. Mind you, Maurice Peace had one of those featureless faces that you could never really remember and never actually forget. He had short mouse-brown hair, parted in the centre—but then so did millions of other men. He had brown neutral eyes, and a nose with a slight bump at the bridge. His mouth was soft and pale and undistinctive, except for a thin clipped moustache along the upper lip. And yet so many wore thin clipped moustaches, particularly since the release of The Thief of Baghdad.

"Okay, I'll make you a private wager," said Mark. "How about a hundred dollars?"

"Make it five," said Maurice. He had 120 pounds in his left spatterdash, enough for one big personal wager like this, and for a small opening stake in a poker game.

"We don't know the numbers yet," Mark replied.

"What does that matter? Whatever number you buy in the ship's pool, high or low, I'll bet you five hundred dollars that it's at least three miles fewer."

Mark smiled. He had been deliriously conscious all evening of the harmonic vibration of the Arcadia's reciprocating engines, and the humming of her turbines, and he knew that she was running smoothly and quickly. He wanted this ship for himself, and any criticism of the headway she was making was almost like hearing from his lawyers that a girl he was dating had a reputation for being too "fast'. Maurice Peace didn't know it, but he had instinctively given Mark Beeney the one challenge that he couldn't refuse. That was the way Maurice Peace made his precarious living, however: by the seat of his unpaid-for trousers, and by his supernatural sensitivity to all those perverse prides and private weaknesses which led men to lay down good money, in any currency, simply to prove themselves right.

"Very well," Mark said. "Make it five hundred. I'll have pleasure in collecting it from you."

Maurice Peace took another sandwich, and pushed it into his mouth. Somehow Mark couldn't take his eyes off him; he felt in some inexplicable fashion that this man was to have an eerie and significant hand in his destiny, or had already done so in the past. What had Marcia said at Brown's Hotel about a shiver coming over her, like cold water?

"I'm trying to place where I've met you before," Mark told Maurice. "A speak, maybe, in New York? The Marlboro Club, on 61st? The Tree, on 55th?"

Maurice Peace shrugged and shook his head. "I've been in Ireland for the summer. The flat racing, you know. Good horseback racing in Ireland, the best. What the Irish don't know about horses, you could tell your sister Sue in a two-cent telegram."

"You came aboard at Dublin?" frowned Mark.

Maurice took two more sandwiches, one in each hand, and bit at

them alternately. "A thirsty fish, the anchovy," he said in a noncommittal

voice. Mark said slowly, "Yes... I guess it is," and went back to the Grand Lounge for the after-dinner dancing. The swing door swung behind him.

Then, on the curving staircase leading up on to the promenade deck from the first-class lounge, there was an encounter between Rudyard Philips and Mademoiselle Narron. Mademoiselle Narron had changed out of her red gown because she had felt the first twinges of a migraine headache coming on. Red made her migraines worse. Now she wore a low-scooped gown by Martial et Armand in turquoise crepe du Maroc, trimmed with gold thread. Between the stately freckled custards of her breasts lay a green-and-gold enamelled pendant, one of the last gifts she had received from Raymond Walters before Raymond had decided to put his wife and his cello before the uncertainties of operatic passion. (How Raymond had loved her once, though! How he had gripped the girdle of fat that surmounted her hips, and squeezed it with all the speechless appreciation of a man who had once stood for two-and-a-half hours in front of Rubens" Arrival of Marie de Medici in the Louvre, completely missing his lunch.)

Rudyard said, "Mademoiselle, we ought to talk, you and I. I mean—we really ought to get things straight between us. It seems that we've rather got off on the wrong foot."

"The wrong foot?" Louise Narron asked him. It was an English idiom which, inexplicably, she had never heard before. She looked down at her green slippers and then back at Rudyard, frowning in bewilderment.

Rudyard took her arm and shepherded her upstairs to the foyer.

"The thing is," he told her, "I may have given you the wrong impression."

"I see," she said thoughtfully. "In what way?"

"Well," said Rudyard, "you asked me if I would help you. And, I said yes, I would."

"And you no longer wish to do so?"

эNot at all. That's not what I'm saying at all. I do wish to help you, very much. It's just that I'm not sure you took what I said the right way."

"A misunderstanding, you mean? Une mesintelligence?"

Rudyard clasped his hands together, but then realised that he looked and felt like an Anglican priest, and dropped them immediately down to his sides. One of his housemasters at school had always called him "the Reverend Philips" because of his unctious mannerisms. He said, "Quite frankly, I'm in just as much of a mess as you are. I don't think I'm really going to be very much help."

"You told me. You had to leave someone behind in England whom you loved. But that is fate, isn't it? We cannot help fate."

Rudyard guided Mademoiselle Narron to the window. In the glass, their reflections stared back at them with dark secrecy, two supercilious ghosts who could cynically and magically float in the night. Rudyard could smell Mademoiselle Narron's perfume, and the closeness of her statuesque body made him feel strangely feverish and uncertain of what he was going to say.

"Perhaps it's better if we look for our own answers," he said. "I think, if I were to try to help you, and if you were to try to help me... well, I'm afraid that there might be an entanglement."

"Des complications? Mais pourquoi? Je veux vous calmer. Rien plus."

"Well, I know," said Rudyard. "The trouble us, I think I might be rather inclined to take your solicitude for something else ... for affection, for instance."

"Why not?" demanded Mademoiselle Narron. "Is affection such a sin? How can one person help another without affection?"

Rudyard rubbed his forehead. "I don't know. I'm afraid I'm rather confused."

Mademoiselle Narron laid one mighty arm around his shoulders. In her green evening shoes, she was at least am inch taller than he was, and apart from confusing him, she made hum feel indescribably puny. Perhaps, when it came down to it, that was exactly what attracted him towards her with such irresistible strength. Perhaps, at this moment, he needed nothing more than a muscular Earth Mother, die Herrschende Erdemutter, to help him to overcome his bitter sense of loss about Toy and to reinflate his collapsed self-confidence. The only problem was, he was afraid of Mademoiselle Narron, and even more afraid of what he felt for her. We can all admire Niagara Falls, but very few of us actually want to go over them in a barrel.

"Of course you are confused," Mademoiselle Narron told him. "I am confused, too. It is desperately confusing to be rejected. But all I hope is that in our confusion we can cling to each other, and give each other comfort."

"I don't know," said Rudyard. He took out a -cigarette, tapped it on his thumbnail, and lit it, blowing the smoke out of the side of his mouth so that it wouldn't go into Mademoiselle Narron's face. "I think that it's better if we don't go on meeting each other. Better for both of us."

Beneath their feet, the Arcadia's deck was rolling—hesitating—and rolling again. There was a sense of time and destiny passing in the night. Whether the portents of astrology were true or not, the vivid stars wheeled wonderfully above the Arcadia's line of passage, and the separate fates of her passengers were changed with each rising and setting star.

Rudyard said, "I'm married, you know."

"Of course you are," said Mademoiselle Narron. "I saw your wedding-band. But marriage is all nonsense, don't you think, when you come down to it?"

"You've talking to some of our American passengers, haven't you?"

Mademoiselle Narron curled the ends of her gingery hair around her fingers. "What of it? They are mostly very sharp, very witty. They call Sir Peregrine le grand fromage."

"Le gran fromage? You mean the big cheese?" Rudyard couldn't help laughing.

"There," smiled Mademoiselle Narron. "I amused you. I cannot be so bad for you."

Rudyard, still grinning, breathed out smoke. "No, mademoiselle, I don't think that you are. Perhaps you are just what I need."

"Then you will accept my invitation to come to my stateroom for coffee and liqueurs?"

"That should be my line," said Rudyard.

Mademoiselle Narron twirled around the promenade deck with surprising lightness and style, her toes pointed like a prima ballerina's. "It doesn't matter who seduces whom," she sang. "If there is affection and honesty, then who cares?"

"You're seducing me?"

Mademoiselle Narron stopped in mid-pirouette. "Of course. Do you think that we can really help each other if we don't make love?"

Rudyard felt the Arcadia dip and roll, nosing into new currents. It was one-fifteen in the morning, and she was passing the Fastnet Rock, on the southern tip of Ireland, before heading out into open ocean. From here to New York, there was nothing but seawater. For a moment Rudyard turned away, not angrily or temperamentally, but only to hold on to the rail and let the deep thrumming of 50,000 horsepower vibrate through his fingers and his bones and his soul. This was a ship with the power and the grace of a classic racehorse. This was a ship that should have been his.

"You'll come?" asked Mademoiselle Narron.

A steward passed between them with a half-bottle of Pommery champagne and a Welsh rarebit on a silver tray. Rudyard waited until the steward was out of earshot before he said, "Louise? You don't mind if I call you Louise?"

"You'll come?"

Rudyard nodded, not speaking in case the heavens heard him committing himself. He was still under the same skies as Toy, after all; and he could still picture quite clearly the gentle flatness of her Chinese face, and her tiny dark-nippled breasts, and that childlike mound of Venus on which no hairs grew. He could still remember her saying, "Heaven and earth are not ruthful; to them, the ten thousand things are but as straw dogs." She had been quoting Lao-Tzu's Tao-te-ching. Rudyard hadn't understood a word of it, not a single word. But, while he was here on this brightly-lit promenade deck with Louise Narron, Toy was probably sleeping with her lover Laurence, and not dreaming of Rudyard even for a moment. Maybe that was justification enough for anything.

"You'll forgive my hesitation," he said. "It isn't meant as an insult."

"I am not in any position to forgive you," replied Mademoiselle Narron. "I cannot give you absolution, Rudyard, any more than I am seeking absolution in return. I am simply seeking reassurance and comfort."

Rudyard said, "Yes, well," and crushed his cigarette out underfoot. If Sir Peregrine had seen him drop a lighted cigarette on the deck, it would have meant a ten-minute lecture; and he would never have done it aboard his own Aurora. But tonight was different. Tonight was a night when the rules didn't count. At least, they didn't count if you were brave enough not to want them to.

Once inside her stateroom, Mademoiselle Narron closed the door behind them and pranced across the room to the cocktail cabinet. "I can offer you a cocktail they invented for me in Rome, in 1921, for the opening of L"Incoronazione di Poppea. I was Poppea, of course. I was wonderful that season! My voice had wings! The cocktail is called Poppea, after the pan I played. Can you guess what's in it? Peach brandy and gin, flamed with sugar."

"I'll just have a Scotch, if you've got some."

"A Scotch? That's a drink for those who want oblivion, not fun."

Rudyard loosened his bow-tie and took off his dinner jacket. "Perhaps I can find one when I'm not in pursuit of the other."

"Well," said Mademoiselle Narron teasingly, "it depends which one you are pursuing and which one you hope to find! There will be no oblivion with me, I can assure you. Raymond always used to say—well, it doesn't matter what Raymond always used to say. He will never say it again. Not to me. But I am not a passive woman, you know. It has never been my nature to take life recumbently."

Rudyard, a little uneasily, watched Mademoiselle Narron pour him him almost half a glass of straight Scotch whisky. "That's—that's quite enough," he advised her. "I'm officer of the watch at 4 am. I can't afford to have a hangover."

"If you can afford to follow your heart, you can afford anything. Do you know who said that?"

Rudyard took his drink. "I'm not sure that I do. Was it Oscar Wilde?"

Mademoiselle Narron was blithely setting fire to a jiggerful of gin and sugar. She watched the blue flames spit and crackle for a moment, then tipped the blazing spirits into a chilled pink glass of peach brandy. "Oscar Wilde would never have said anything so ridiculously romantic. It was Raymond. He said it one day when we were walking on the South Downs. If only I had known then that he would leave me."

"Don't you think there's any chance at all that he might change his mind?" asked Rudyard.

She shook her head. "I saw his face when he told me it was all over. It is worse sometimes for the person who is leaving than for the person who is left. Such pain on poor Raymond's face!" She sipped her cocktail, and then spread herself out on her sofa. "Do you want to kiss me?" she asked.

Rudyard said, "I beg your pardon?"

"Do you want to kiss me? You can kiss me, if you like."

"Mademoiselle Narron—Louise—"

She ran her hand through her wild gingery hair, and threw back her head. "Oh, how much I like Englishmen! Always so cold, always so polite! Don't you know how much that drives me crazy, that coldness? It inflames me! I say to you, "Kiss me! please kiss me!" A Frenchman would have been lying beside me in the blinking of an eye, in an instant, plastering me with kisses! But you say, "I beg your pardon?" so polite, so stand-office!"

"Offish, actually," corrected Rudyard, grateful to have the opportunity to change the subject.

"What? What did you say?" questioned Mademoiselle Narron.

"It's not stand-office. It's stand-offish. "Ish" is an English ending that means "sort of". As, for instance, in "greenish"."

"Greenish? What is "greenish"? Like "Greenish Mean Time"?"

Rudyard perched himself on the aim of oat of the chairs. "If you were feeling seasick, mal-de-mer, and if your cheeks were looking rather green, I'd say, "My dear Louise, you look a bit greenish". Or, it's like "peckish", meaning hungry."

"Ah," said Mademoiselle Narron, nodding in comprehension. "And also like "radish"?"

"Well," said Rudyard, with an abrupt laugh. But then he realised that Mademoiselle Narron's attention was fixed exclusively on his face, and that she was devouring him alive with her eyes. "Well," he said, less confidently, "sort of. Yes, sort of like radish."

"But you still have not kissed me," she protested, her voice throaty. "You have taught me "ish". But you can teach me "ish" from the other side of the room. You can teach me "ish" by letter. To kiss me, you will have to come closer."

"Louise—"

"Aaah!" she shrieked, a perfect middle A. "Come closer! Oh, you're so cold! Even Raymond was never as cold! It thrills me! Don't you see what you're doing to me? You're so cruel!"

With a melodramatic flourish, like a tragic heroine quaffing poison in the last act of a Wagnerian opera, she drained down her gin-and-brandy cocktail. Then she swung her arm and lobbed the empty glass across the stateroom. It landed unbroken in a half-open desk drawer. Rudyard stared at her in utter surprise as if she had thrown it so accurately on purpose.

"I am a woman on fire!" Mademoiselle Narron declaimed. "I am a woman on fire and you are a pillar of ice! How can I melt you unless I embrace you?"

She rose to her feet and she was as red and as inexorable as a column of erupting lava rising from Mount Etna. Fiercely, she jerked off her evening gloves, and hurled them to the floor. Then she tugged open the buttons of her evening gown, and wrestled it off over her head. While she was temporarily blinded inside her upraised gown, Rudyard said, "Louise, I'm not sure that this is really the way to—"

"What did you say?" she cried in a muffled voice.

Rudyard stood up. It seemed inappropriate to be sitting cross-legged on the edge of an armchair white Mademoiselle Narron was struggling so enthusiastically out of her clothes. It made him feel even more like the Reverend Philips than ever. He put down his whisky glass, but then he picked it up again and drank the whole lot down in one swallow. For some peculiar reason he began to think of the time when he had been selected to go in to bat for the school cricket team when they were seventy-five for six wickets against Dulwich College, and when only an heroic batting effort could possibly have saved them.

"Listen, Louise," he began. "I can't say that you don't attract me. I You do, like the devil. You're a remarkable woman."

She didn't give him the chance to say any more. She emerged flushed from her tangled evening gown and tossed it onto the sofa. "I knew you were tender from the moment you first looked at me," I the said. "That one, my heart sang! That one, he is for me! Balm to the spirit, comfort for the soul!"

Dressed in nothing more than her pink underslip, beneath which her huge breasts bounced in a complicated two-step, and in pink silk stockings, over the top of which her heavy white thighs wobbled in rhythmical accompaniment, Louise Narron advanced across the crimson rug with her arms open wide for Rudyard to embrace her. Rudyard stared at her for one giddy moment: at her wide green eyes, at her irrepressible red hair, at her pink pouting lips which wanted nothing more than to suck and nuzzle at his unprotected flesh. And he thought, God, I'm scared.

He could have funked it, of course, with a quick salute and a hurried good night. He could have pushed her away. He could even have pretended to faint. But then how could he have endured the rest of the voyage, seeing her four or five times a day on the promenade deck, and at dinner? He would have ended up slinking around his own ship like a fugitive.

Besides, although he was frightened by her, she did excite him. She made his brains feel as if they were effervescing in champagne, and the blood between his legs boil like giblet gravy. And it was his fear of her, as much as anything, that electrified him.

He said, "Louise, we ought to—" but then she grasped his face in her hands and kissed him soundly on the lips.

He wondered if this was what it was like when you drowned. Louise Narron's mouth was clamped so tightly to his that he was unable to breathe, and after the first thirty seconds the room seemed to go dark and the stars appeared to come out. He thought of Toy, and about that silly cricket match against Dulwich, but he also found it impossible to ignore the huge bosoms that were squashed against his mess jacket, and the Amazonian thigh that was working its way up between his knees. Then he felt the greedy fingers that were twisting open his buttons, and the grasping hand that was forcing its way into his trousers, and he understood with considerable clarity and also with some relief that he was being raped.

As for Louise Narron herself, her disappointment and her hurt both needed quenching so thoroughly and so urgently that she was not ashamed of what she was doing. Usually, in spite of her operatic physique, she was a shy and very feminine woman. Coquettish, sometimes. For Raymond had always taken the initiative when they had made love together, and Raymond had always treated her as if she were a gentle and sensitive creature, a butterfly or a bird. He had adored her sheer fleshiness, of course. That had been the stuff of his desire for her. He had loved to enfold his penis in the rolls of her stomach, or between her breasts. But he had always treated her fat as if it were ethereal, as if it were nothing more substantial than the billows in a Rubens painting, and he had always given her wings. Except on that last day, when the ethereal had suddenly been exposed as being heavily corporeal; and Louise Narron had discovered that she could no longer fly.

Raymond had been the latest and the most painful in a lifetime of rejections. Louise's parents had been rigid bourgeoisie and puritanically suspicious of anything theatrical. Her father, a magistrates" clerk, had once tanned her for singing a trill on theSabbath. Her mother had disapproved of everything she did, andhad thrown two terms of school crochet-work on the fire because Louise had been "too proud" about it. Only the efforts of a sympathetic Ursuline sister at the convent where she was educated had allowed Louise to carry on with music lessons; and even when she was chosen to sing with the Metropolitan Opera Company her parents had refused to attend because her opening performance was in Le Nozze di Figaro, and her mother had once been annoyed by an Italian lodger.

Her success in opera had been meteoric. Her voice, in the words of the opera critic for Le Figaro, was like "the core of the sun'. But in her private life there had been one disastrous affair after another. Guido Carlo, the operatic producer; Charles Feldman, the producer; and then Raymond. Perhaps her lovers, mistaking her success on for supreme confidence, and her statuesque body for a a personality, had always expected her to take the initiative. Perhaps, contrarily, she had needed them too much. Whatever it was, she was determined to be aggressive with Rudyard. She was determined that she would never wait again by a telephone that never rang, or in a dingy hotel room for somebody else's husband who never showed up.

She pinned Rudyard down on the silky quilt of her bed while she forced him to penetrate her. She gripped his wrists and clung on to them as if she were riding a Scott motorcycle, and jostled her ample buttocks onto his midriff until he had pierced the very deepest crevice of her. His face was ruddily tanned as far as his collar: the rest of him was white, apart from the two tanned gloves of his hands. He coughed and went crimson as he filled her, far too promptly, with semen. Then she rolled over and lay on the bed staring at the ceiling, while he hopped and struggled into his mess trousers.

He didn't feel guilty, of course, that he hadn't satisfied her. In 1924 it was still unusual for men to realise that women needed to reach a climax quite as regularly as men. The word "orgasm" was not in public currency. As long as a chap got it over with, well, that was all right; and if the woman liked it too, well, that was a bonus.

"You're disappointed," said Louise.

"Of course not," Rudyard told her, flicking one end of his bow tie over the other and tightening it up. "That was wonderful."

"No, it wasn't," said Louise. "It was sad. Sad, and useless."

Rudyard knew that she was right. But he couldn't understand what had gone wrong. As a matter of fact, he couldn't understand why it had happened at all. He finished tying his tie.

Louise sat up. Between her parted thighs, white fluid dripped slowly out of ginger hair, as slowly as glue, or honey. She thought of the morning that Raymond had once sat naked on a Czechoslovakian bentwood chair and played Mozart on his cello. Sad, sweet, throatsome music that had made her openly cry. She had left a single tear running down the window that overlooked Kensington Gore and the Albert Hall.

"Well, perhaps we should try again, when I have had fewer Poppea cocktails," said Louise. "Or then again, perhaps not."

Rudyard said, "I'm sorry. I don't know what to say."

"Why should you say anything? It was just as much my fault as yours."

Rudyard buttoned up his suspenders, and then pushed his arms into the sleeves of his mess jacket. "Let's talk tomorrow," he said.

"Yes," she said. She was still sitting on the bed when Rudyard left the stateroom and closed the door behind him as quietly as if he were closing a safe which contained a guilty secret.

Only a few minutes after Rudyard had left Louise Narron's stateroom, the wireless officer—Willis the Wireless, as he was unfailingly nicknamed—knocked respectfully at the door of Sir Peregrine's sitting-room. Sir Peregrine was listening to Elgar on his gramophone and twiddling his stockinged toes in tune to the music. "What is it?" he demanded. He was drinking mineral water with a slice of lemon in it, and nibbling at cashew nuts. He always felt hungry in the early hours of the morning, and he had been known on several occasions to make his way down to a ship's pantry in his dressing gown, to pilfer a slice of game pie or some of the hot rolls that the night shift were making in the bakery.

"Message from the harbourmaster at Dublin, sir," said the wireless officer.

"Well? What do the bloody Irish want now?"

Willis the Wireless had only been seconded to the Arcadia at the last moment, and he was unused to captains as grand and as elevated as Sir Peregrine Arrowsmith. What was even more unnerving, he had taken the wireless message himself, and he knew what was in it. All he could find the courage to do was to hold out the message in a trembling hand until Sir Peregrine snatched it from him, and then to stand to attention, his eyes fixed on the oil painting above the fireplace of RMS Shannon in an Atlantic swell. Sir Peregrine's sitting room was panelled in oak and spread with Indian carpets, like a Pall Mall club in miniature. The interior designers had originally suggested "a functional studio', but Sir Peregrine had adamantly refused to have anything to do with it. "Too damned German," he had declared.

Chewing cashews, Sir Peregrine unfolded the message and read it. Halfway through, he stopped chewing. In the quick block letters of a wireless operator's hand were written the words: "Irish fishing vessel has rescued eleven-year-old boy Sean Joyce, survivor of wreck of fishing smack Drogheda, out of Dublin. Boy claims Drogheda was run down by Arcadia at high speed and sunk. Search continues for Thomas Dennis, hirer of boat, feared drowned."

"What's this nonsense?" asked Sir Peregrine, fiercely, holding up the message as he chased the last few fragments of nut around the him of his cheeks with the tip of his tongue. "When did this arrive?"

"Just arrived, sir," said Willis. "Just arrived this minute."

"Well, what does it mean?" demanded Sir Peregrine. "What does it all mean? An eleven-year-old boy says I ran him down? What kind of damned nonsense is that?"

"I don't know, sir," said Willis, unhappily.

"I don't expect you to know, don't worry about that," blustered Sir Peregrine. "Every single damned wireless message the Irish send out is either incomprehensible or reprehensible. Generally both. I'm asking you rhetorically, if you know what it means. In other words, I'm asking you, but I know the answer already, and the answer is humbug, that's what the answer is. Hum-bloody-bug."

He circled his sitting-room as if he were chasing a bluebottle. Then he stopped and stiffly handed the message back to the wireless operator and snapped, "Send a message to the Dublin harbourmaster. What's his name? O'Shaughnessy or some other damned barbaric nonsense. Ask him what the damned hell he means by this message. Ask him what the damned hell he's going on about. Put it politely, of course. Say, "Arcadia in no known collision. Kindly furnish details. And may the whole of Ireland sink into the sea without a trace". No, leave out that last sentence, damn it."

Back in the wireless room, Willis the Wireless donned his headphones and hurriedly began to send back to Dublin the message that the Arcadia knew nothing of any collision with the Drogheda, and would Dublin please furnish further information. He was still tapping away at his key when Rudyard Philips looked in at the door, looking tired and anxious and still adjusting his bow tie.

"Anything up?" he asked, offering the wireless officer a cigarette.

Willis declined the cigarette with a wave of his hand and continued tapping out Morse.

"What's wrong?" Rudyard repeated. In reply, Willis pushed across the original message from Dublin harbour. Rudyard picked it up and read it carefully.

"My God," he said. "We've killed someone."

The wireless officer took off his headphones and laid them on the table. "I don't know yet, sir. That's the only information we've received."

"What did Sir Peregrine say about it? I mean, he's seen it, of course?"

"Oh yes, sir, I took it straight round to his sitting room. He took it very bad, sir. Said it was nonsense."

Rudyard said, "Very well," and walked quickly along the deck to the door of Sir Peregrine's quarters. He tightened his bow tie and knocked.

"Oh, it's you," said Sir Peregrine. He was ready for bed now, in royal blue silk pyjamas, with the Keys company crest embroidered on the pocket in gold braid.

"I've just seen the message from Dublin, Sir Peregrine," said Rudyard.

"As well you might," Sir Peregrine nodded. "More damned madness, that's all I can say. The whole damned country's populated by thieves and lunatics. Now they're claiming we've run over one of their sightseeing vessels. Madness."

"We did leave Irish waters at an unusually high speed," Rudyard reminded him.

"Unusually high speed, Mr Philips?" asked Sir Peregrine. "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean we were steaming full ahead, sir, when we were still within the three-mile limit, and we had been warned of the presence of small craft. Also, the visibility wasn't particularly good."

Sir Peregrine stared at him glassily. "If that is so, Mr Philips, then I would like to know who was on the bridge at that time."

"I was, sir. Acting under your specific instructions."

"What?" said Sir Peregrine. "What instructions? To steam out of Irish waters like a bat out of hell? Did I specifically instruct you to do that? To proceed at full speed without paying any attention whatsoever to the presence of small craft? Did you hear me say that?"

"Not in so many words, sir."

"Then what? What were these specific instructions that led you to believe you could run down anyone you liked, willy-nilly?"

"You said slow ahead for one mile, sir, and then full ahead. You said we should show those Irish barbarians what a modem express liner could do."

Sir Peregrine clasped the back of his library chair, and his fingertips dug into it as if he were gripping an Irishman's neck. "In that case, Mr. Philips, I believe you misheard me. I believe we have a misunderstanding here, and that's putting it charitably. I don't know how things were run on the Aurora, God help her, before she went into dry-dock; but I don't want them run like that on this vessel. I specifically told you slow ahead for three miles, and to pay particular attention to small vessels."

"I have to disagree with you, sir. You clearly said slow ahead for one mile, and when I continued to sail slow ahead as a precaution, you criticised me for disobeying your orders. The impression you gave me was that you wanted to vacate Irish territorial waters as quickly as humanly possible."

"Impression?" screamed Sir Peregrine. Spit flew from his lips, and he stalked around the library chair and confronted Rudyard from only six inches away. "Impression? You're the captain of your own ship, Mr. Philips, and you talk about sailing the world's largest passenger liner on an impression?"

Rudyard said dully, "We've had a collision, Sir Peregrine. A man may have drowned. All you're trying to do is lay the blame on me instead of on yourself, where you know it belongs."

Sir Peregrine turned away. "I see," he said. "You're reduced to snivelling now, are you, and blind accusations? Is that it? You won't accept the responsibility of your own foolhardy actions? Is that it? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

"You gave me clear orders to sail slow ahead for one mile, and then to sail full ahead thereafter," repeated Rudyard.

"Rubbish!" Sir Peregrine expostulated. "Rubbish and double-rubbish! How dare you suggest that I could do such a thing! You pathetic, spineless, lukewarm, nattering sea-creature! How dare you! I order you confined to your quarters until further notice!"

Rudyard took a deep, unsteady breath. "You've been waiting for this, haven't you? You've been waiting for any opportunity to get me out of your way. Well, you can do your worst, but I can remember your orders to the last letter. If someone's drowned, then it's your responsibility, and however much you bluster and fuss, I'm going to make damn sure that you get just what you deserve. You're a puffed-up, ridiculous incompetent, and it's about time this company realised it. You no more deserve to captain a ship like the Arcadia than Captain Bligh deserved to command the Bounty."

Sir Peregrine stood upright and still, as white and as brittle as a fossil of himself might be, if it were excavated from the chalk cliffs of England in some far and unrealised future.

"You are confined to your quarters," he repeated. "Mr. Peel will take over your duties until further notice."

Rudyard was shaking with wrath and nerves. When he spoke, his voice wavered uncontrollably. But he managed to say, "You've made a serious mistake, Sir Peregrine. This isn't an ordinary voyage, by any means. It's the Arcadia's maiden voyage, and the slightest mishap will be investigated with ten times the ordinary amount of rigour. What's more, Mr. Edgar Deacon is aboard; and so is Mr. Fearson; and so is Miss Catriona Keys. They will want to know what has happened in the utmost detail."

"And you will tell them, I suppose?"

"It's my duty."

"I forbid you."

"You can't forbid me to do anything."

"I forbid you! Go to your quarters! You're under arrest!"

"You're a madman," Rudyard told Sir Peregrine. "You're a complete and utter madman."

"And you, Mr. Philips, are worse," retorted Sir Peregrine. "You, Mr. Philips, are a bore."