Maiden Voyage

ONE

She tog cinnamon toast in the kitchen, quite naked except velvet dippers and a pink velvet hair riband, when they came the house to give her the news that her father had died.

Nigel came into the kitchen in his purple and turquoise dressing-gown, and said seriously, "You'd better pop on. Mr. Fearson's outside and says it's rather drastic."

That was probably her last ever carefree moment, her last completely carefree moment, and Nigel would remember it for years even when he was married and living in Oxfordshire with a wife called Penelope, three Shetland ponies, a duck, and a pair of overweight twin daughters with Fair Isle sweaters and freckles. He would see it as an illuminated picture postcard: Catriona standing by New World gas stove, her white face already turning towards him, and those slightly slanted eyes already beginning to cloud, her dark curly hair tied back with the riband, and the long bare curve of her back lighted by the eleven o'clock sunlight. Eleven o'clock morning on Thursday, June 12,1924: what a time and a day to be twenty-three years old and in love, especially with Catriona. She had her mother's height and her mother's figure, tall and unfashionably large-breasted for 1924, but with narrow hips. And she was easily the most devastating girl that Nigel had ever known, even more of a goddess than Rosebud Wilkinson; and he eyed her nakedness possessively as she walked across the kitchen, lifted her pink satin robe from the back of the kitchen chair, and slipped it on.

"Cat, old girl," said Nigel, grasping her shoulders. He was conscious of the slight sway of a heavy breast beneath slippery satin. "I do hope it's nothing frightful."

She nodded, but didn't say anything. Nigel hesitated for a moment, his lips pursed indecisively, then he opened the door wider to let her through into the passage. He held back for a second or two, but then he followed her, clawing quickly at his blond marcelled hair to smarten himself up. He knew the news was serious, and he felt inexplicably ratty. Chaps had no right to come knocking on a chap's door with serious news, not when a chap was just about to have breakfast.

As he passed the foot of the stairs, Nigel could hear the phonograph in the bedroom still squawking out the last few lines of "My Rambler Rose". He had bought the record for Rosebud, but in the past few weeks it had become the song that would always remind him of Catriona's body and Catriona's spirit. He suddenly felt that he might never play "My Rambler Rose" on his phonograph again; might not be able to bear to.

Mr. Fearson was waiting in the cocktail room and so was Mr. Thurrock. Against the snazzy black and gold wallpaper with its pattern of tipsy highball glasses, they looked unrelievedly staid and discomfited, visitors from another age and another morality, before short skirts and bobbed hair and fox trotting had ever been imagined, even in the most indecent of fantasies. Neither Mr. Fearson nor Mr. Thurrock had sat himself in either of the armchairs that Nigel had offered them: in one of the armchairs was a discarded peach-coloured camisole, and in the other was a dirty bread and butter plate on which someone had crushed out a purple cigarette.

"Well?" asked Catriona, her hand still on the door knob. "I'm surprised to see you."

Mr. Fearson's black morning coat was buttoned tightly over a chest that was as solid as the boiler of a small riverboat, and his cheeks were still ruddy from his kipper breakfast. He said, in a blurting voice, "It's not what you think, miss. It's not The Pop." The Pop was what she and Mr. Fearson had irreverently christened those occasional visits that Mr. Fearson was called upon to make whenever company business brought him down south from Formby. "Your father said I should just pop in to see how you were." Because in spite of all their arguing; in spite of their constant clashes over clothes, and smoking, and going out with fast friends, Catriona's father had always prized her and protected her, and wanted to know that she was safe. The newspapers a days were full of stories about cocaine, and white slavery, and unprincipled mashers.

Catriona looked at Mr. Thurrock, but Mr. Thurrock could do nothing more than remove his spectacles, fold them, and stare shortsightedly back at her out of eyes like pale-blue marbles.

"We came down on the first train," said Mr. Fearson. "We thought of the telephone, or a telegram, but your mother thought it wiser to tell you in person. It's bad news, I'm sorry to say. Your father died, just gone midnight last night, of a heart attack. Had he lived, Dr. Whitby said, he would have lived the life of a vegetable."

"A cabbage," put in Mr. Thurrock, as if it were necessary to specify which variety of vegetable.

"He's dead?" said Catriona. She was still holding the doorknob. "I don't understand you."

"Cat, my dear girl," said Nigel and attempted to take her arm, but she tugged it away. She could feel the tears in her eyes but somehow they didn't seem to do anything but blur her vision and turn Mr. Fearson and Mr. Thurrock into dark dancing outlines. The tears didn't relieve the rising lump of grief in her ribcage, nor explain why these two solemn men had suddenly appeared to give her this hateful news on a sunny June morning when it seemed nothing so tragic could possibly have happened. There were blue skies outside those curtains, and birds, and motor-car horns parping in the street. How could her father have died?

"Your mother would like it very much if you could come back with us," said Mr. Fearson. He sniffed in one nostril, and looked very unhappy.

"The rest of the family are coming tomorrow, like," added Mr. Thurrock. "Your cousins, and all."

"Was it quick?" asked Catriona.

Mr. Fearson blinked. He didn't quite know what she meant.

"Was it quick?" she repeated. "The heart attack?"

"Oh, quick," said Mr. Fearson. "Oh, yes, quick." He snapped his fingers and then obviously wished that he hadn't. "Quick as a candle snuffed out, that's what Dr. Whitby said. With us one second, and in the bosom of the Lord the next. Not even time for last words."

Catriona touched the tears in her eyes with her fingertips. "I don't suppose he would have wanted any last words," she said. "He always said that deeds made talking redundant."

There was a long silence. Then Mr. Fearson said, "I'm very sorry, miss. You do have my sympathy. It's a very sad loss."

"Well, yes, it is," said Catriona. She looked at him and gave him a tight, puckered smile. "I suppose the worst of it is that the last time I saw him, we argued."

"They say that fathers and daughters only clash because they're like each other," said Mr. Thurrock. "Same as magnets, you know. Opposite poles attract. Like poles repel."

"Yes," said Catriona. Her voice was as soft as a sheet of tissue-paper, falling from between the leaves of a photograph album. And the photograph she would always recall, whenever she thought of her father, was the one of them walking side by side through the sandhills at Formby, when she was only eight; and both of them, she and her father, had their hands clasped obstinately behind their backs, as if to make absolutely certain that they would not hold hands with each other, not for anything.

Stubborn, stubborn, stubborn, she thought. A whole life of being stubborn, and what for? To die, as quick as a snuffed-out candle, at the age of fifty-three. For some reason, she thought of her father carving the Sunday joint; she could almost smell the roast lamb, and picture his square-fingered hands holding the bone-handled carving knife; and the vision coaxed up more tears.

"Would you like a drink, old girl?" asked Nigel anxiously. "Cup of coffee? Brandy, maybe? I must say you look like something out of Tutankhamen's tomb."

"Make me a ... gin-and-bitters," she said. She held her pink dressing-gown around herself as if she were feeling cold. "Bring it upstairs. I'll have to pack. There's a darling."

Nigel looked over her shoulder at Mr. Fearson and Mr. Thurrock, his face questioning. Mr. Fearson shrugged. It was one of those things. Nothing that anybody could do about it. Sorry, like, but there you are. Catriona left the cocktail room and the three men heard the clack-clack of her high-heeled slippers going up the stairs.

"Well," said Nigel, feeling deflated. "Can I get you gentlemen anything?"

"Bit early for me, thanks," said Mr. Thurrock, stolidly.

Nigel went to the black and silver cocktail bar, found a bottle of gin with a piddling measure left in the bottom, and turned it upside down into a martini glass.

"Party last night?" asked Mr. Fearson, nodding at the untidy room.

"What?" said Nigel. "Oh, no, not really. Just a few friends. You know the kind of thing. Few drinks."

Mr. Thurrock said, "Bit of a high time you have down here in London, then, by and large?"

Nigel shook angostura into Catriona's drink, and stirred it with a glass swizzle stick.

"You could say so. Cat enjoys it. I mean Miss Keys."

He disappeared behind the bar, clinking bottles in his search for one whisky. "I suppose you'll have to postpone the Arcadia's maiden voyage, won't you? Next week, wasn't it?"

"Tuesday she sails," nodded Mr. Fearson.

Nigel reappeared, holding up a bottle of Crawford's. "And she still will?"

Mr. Fearson made a face. "I think Mr. Keys would have wanted her to. That's the way I look at it. Mind you, I reckon it's all up to Mrs. Keys now, whether she sails or not. You have to respect a widow's wishes."

"Bit ominous, though, isn't it?" Nigel said, in a bright voice. "The largest passenger liner since the Titanic, and the owner pops off the week before the first voyage? Bit ominous, I'd say."

"Well, this is your own house, sir," said Mr. Fearson, "and in your own house, I suppose you're entitled to say whatever comes into your head."

Nigel stared at him, his face as sharp as an ice-pick. He looked as if he didn't know whether to stamp his foot or demand that Mr. Fearson should leave the house at once, or blow up in a shower of smoke and confetti. As it was, he picked up the drinks from the bar, and snapped, "I see!"

Mr. Fearson said, "You'll ask Miss Keys to make haste, won't you, sir?"

"I'll see to it that she doesn't keep you waiting too much longer than necessary," Nigel retorted.

"Obliged, sir," replied Mr. Fearson, with a smile.

Upstairs, in the brilliantly sunny bedroom, Nigel banged the drinks down on the glass-topped dressing-table and said, "Bit damned Thomas Hardy, your Mr. Fearson."

Catriona had opened her buffalo-hide suitcase on the bed, and was folding up her white tennis skin. She was reflected in the semicircular mirror which stood at the bead of the bed, and reflected again in the mirror on top of the dressing-table, so that the whole bedroom appeared to be peopled with Catrionas in different stages of packing.

Nigel stood with his ankles crossed, feeling peevish.

"I don't suppose you know when you might be back?" he asked her.

She shook her head.

"Well, funerals don't take that long, do they?" he said. "I mean, after a chap's dead, you can't keep a chap above ground for too long, can you?"

"Nigel," she warned him. He recognised the tone of her voice and raised his hand, fingers spread, like an exasperated Italian tenor. Mama mia. Before Catriona had come into his life, he had never even known that anything he said was in dubious taste. His lack of sensitivity had been part of his charm. There was no doubt about it, she had given him some wonderful times. She had even enabled him to glimpse ecstasy. But she had definitely provincialised him. His friend Tommy Tompkins had said to him only two or three days ago, after he had been talking about hare coursing, or showing respect for one's parents, or some such subject, "That's a frightfully Formby thing to say."

Yet, how frustrating it all was. She was so beautiful.

"You'll give me a tinkle when you arrive," he said.

She looked up. "I don't know. I may. Do you really want me to?"

He pouted at himself in the dressing-table mirror. "Do what you like," he said, more to his reflected face than to her.

She paused in her packing. Then she came across to him, and took his hands in hers, and kissed him on the cheek, and then on the mouth, very precisely but also very tenderly.

"You think I'm going for good, don't you?" she said, softly.

He swivelled his eyes around, partly because he was clowning and partly because he was trying to stop himself from crying. "The thought had actually crossed a chap's mind."

"Don't be sad," she insisted. "That was why I fell for you when I first met you, because you looked like the kind of man who would never be sad."

"I see," he said. "Life and soul, that kind of thing."

"That's right. And you're famous. What more could a girl want?"

"Famous, hah!" he said, scornfully. "Two small parts in two medium-to-average West End musicals, and I'm famous! My dear girl, the name of Nigel Myers might twinkle and shine in the saloon bar of the Queen's Elm, but scarcely anywhere else. I shouldn't think a single soul in Ongar has ever heard of me."

Catriona stroked his unshaven cheek, prickled with blond. "I've never heard you so modest," she said. "You're not trying to tell me something, are you? Nigel?"

"Why should I be?"

She lowered her hand. Her two reflections lowered their hands.

Nigel said, "I could be trying to ask you to come back, as quickly as you possibly can. As soon as this beastly Formby business is all over."

"I'll have to make sure my mother is taken care of."

Nigel sighed. "Yes, of course you will."

"And then there'll be the question of probate."

"Of course. Mother and probate and all the rest of the tackle that goes with having a family. When should I expect you? Nineteen twenty-nine?"

"Nigel," she chided him, "we've had such fun together."

"Now I know you're not coming back."

She turned away, back towards the bed, where her half-packed case him open. She had always known, in a strangely lucid way, that if ever she left Nigel, she would never be able to return to him. Not because she didn't actually love him: she did. He was fast and funny and he knew everybody in London who was worth knowing. He had a red Gwynne eight-horsepower runabout with a back end like a small boat, and she would remember their harum-scarum drives through the summer villages of Surrey for as long as she lived. But she was twenty-one now, and the family into which she had been born, for all of her rebellion against it, was calling her back. You can't have the wind in your hair forever. You can't grow old amongst actors.

"I promise you, Nigel, I will let you know how I'm getting on," the said. "I do promise you that."

Nigel looked at her steadily, and then pulled a wry sort of expression—a little too theatrical, but easier than having to show her how he really felt. "Well, old girl, you don't have to make me any promises, you know. Just one: that you'll make sure you're always happy, and that you don't go chaining yourself for life to some dunce who doesn't appreciate what a rare treasure you are."

Catriona picked up a pale blue angora cardigan and folded the sleeves over. She couldn't say anything at all, not without crying; and just now she didn't want to cry, not in front of Nigel. She wanted him to think that she had left him bravely, and cheerfully, and that they could still be friends. But when she thought of the way they had run headlong down Box Hill on an August afternoon, and of beer and sandwiches in smoky country pubs, it was difficult not to feel so sad and nostalgic that the tears ran down her cheeks anyway.

"You'd better go, my love," said Nigel. "I don't want to make things worse for you than they are already."

She nodded, and tied up the last of her lipsticks and her jars of rouge in her washbag.

"I'll bring the case down," Nigel told her.

By now, Mr. Fearson and Mr. Thurrock had moved into the hallway, and Mr. Fearson had his hand on the door-handle. Outside in the sunshine a taxi-cab was waiting, its driver reading a copy of the Daily Mirror. Mr. Fearson took Catriona's arm as she came down the stairs, and led her out into Royal Hospital Road. Mr. Thurrock mutely offered to take the suitcase from Nigel, but Nigel insisted on stowing it on to the taxi's luggage platform himself.

"You'll take care then, old thing," said Nigel, as the cabbie opened the door, and Catriona lowered her head to climb in.

"You too," she whispered, and then got inside, sitting in the shadow of the far corner. Nigel had an unusual view of the broad shiny seat of Mr. Fearson's black trousers as he hefted himself in after her; and Mr. Thurrock, who was last, raised his hat to Nigel with all the morbid impudence of an undertaker.

"We're indebted, you know," he said.

Nigel stood on the pavement in his flashy dressing-gown as the taxi pulled away from the curb and chugged off in the direction of Sloane Street. The tiny oval window in the back of the taxi's hood was tinted dark brown, and so he saw nothing of Catriona as she drove out of his life, not even the brim of her hat. A Chelsea pensioner in his bright scarlet military tunic came across the road to where a standing, and watched the disappearing taxi with equal interest.

"They a not worth it, you know," he remarked, in a phlegmy voice, as the cab turned the corner.

Nigel looked at him. "What aren't?"

"Women," said the pensioner. "They say they're going to wait for you, but they never do. Women and their promises! Mine didn't wait."

Nigel said, "Oh, I'm sorry," and then went back into the house.