Maiden Voyage

SIXTY-TWO

As the first-class passengers assembled in the Grand Lounge for the beginning of the fancy-dress ball, two significant conversations took place. One was between the Knave of Hearts, who looked distinctly like Maurice Peace, and Julius Caesar, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Derek Holdsworth. Maurice was eating an anchovy-and-cheese sandwich, and holding a pint tankard of Mumm's champagne. Derek Holdsworth was eating nothing at all, and looking anxiously around for Harry Pakenow. He was very unhappy that he had let Harry go, especially since Mrs. Chalk-Herbert had reported earlier this evening that one of her diamond bracelets was missing. Derek's father had divided the human race into three, like a cheese. There were decent sorts, he had averred, and bad lots, and women. That was all. Before you made up your mind about anybody, you had to work out into which category they fell, and after that it was easy. Harry Pakenow, quite obviously, was a bad lot. He certainly wasn't a woman. The only exception to Derek's father's rule had been it's mother, who had somehow contrived to be a woman and a decent sort both at once. As a boy, Derek had found that mystifying. It still mystified him slightly.

Maurice said, "Odd that, about yesterday's run."

"What was odd about it?" asked Derek Holdsworth, abstractedly.

"Odd that we managed to sail so far, even though we stopped to rescue Miss Conroy."

Derek frowned. "The Arcadia is a very fast vessel, Mr. Peace."

"Well, I'm aware of that. But 635 miles? It doesn't really seem possible."

"You don't think so?"

Maurice finished his sandwich and licked his fingers. "I just thought it was a little fishy, that's all."

"Well try one without anchovies in."

"I meant the mileage, Mr. Holdsworth, not the cheese sandwiches."

Derek Holdsworth blinked. Then he said, "Oh, the mileage. Oh, well. You know what happened about that."

"No," said Maurice, suspiciously. "What happened about that?"

"It was all something to do with daily averages, Mr. Deacon said. We had to turn in fairly similar figures for each day's sailing, in order to satisfy the investors that we were running smoothly. That's why we entered six hundred and thirty-six for the last twenty-four hours; and that's why we're steaming ahead so fast now to make up the actual distance."

Maurice looked at him with his head inquisitively cocked to one side.

"You mean we didn't actually sail six hundred and thirty-six miles?"

Derek Holdsworth nodded. "But don't tell anyone I told you. Strictly hush-hush."

Maurice made a thoughtful face. "I wouldn't dream of telling anybody you told me. Not a soul."

Just then, Lord Willunshaw came across the crowded lounge in a long white toga, dressed as Diogenes. He was carrying a brass lamp in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other.

"Are you looking for an honest man or an alcoholic?" asked Maurice.

"I'm looking for neither, as a matter of fact. I'm looking for you. Do you fancy a return game of poker tonight? Give a chap a chance to win some of his money back?"

"Lord Willunshaw, I'm going to try to put this nicely," said Maurice. "I've been gambling all my life and you're not really in my league. I don't want to see you lose any more. I've already won two of your loose-boxes, a sofa, and one of your servants' cottages. Next you'll be staking your horses, or your daughters, or something."

Lord Willunshaw cleared his throat loudly. "Damn it," he said, "you can have me daughters any time. But not me damn horses."

Across the lounge, under the sparkling lights, through the laughing crowds of cavaliers and pierrots and punchinellos, through the bright and hilarious group who were blacked up as ebony steppers from a Harlem nightclub, through the mermaids and kings and Harlequins, Harry Pakenow made his uncertain way. He had no fancy-dress costume of his own, but his steward, a miniature ginger-haired man of intense dapperness, had managed to borrow on his behalf a clown's costume, in silvery satin, with black diamond patches on it, and black ruffles at the neck and cuffs, and a black skullcap. Unhappy, lonely, and uncertain, Harry skirted around the edge of the lounge, smiling back at anyone who waved to him, but feeling completely isolated from all this wealth and gaiety and swinging music.

At length, he stood by one of the lounge's reflecting pillars, drinking his third glass of champagne more quickly than he ought to, and eating a kidney wrapped in bacon. He saw Catriona arrive down the staircase, in her dazzling white fairy-tale crinoline and her tall white elaborate wig; and Mark Beeney, as Prince Charming, in a midnight-blue Regency frock-coat, and tight white breeches which Harry (with his glum but uncompromising eye for life's realities) thought far too revealing to the assembled company. He finished his champagne, and a steward immediately took away his glass and gave him another one. Tonight, he thought, I'm going to get extremely pissed. Or spifflicated, as most of the young people in cabin class called it.

"Hallo," said a voice by Harry's elbow. He looked around, and it was Lucille Foster, dressed in pink, as the Sugar Plum Fairy.

"Hallo," said Harry. "I didn't know you were allowed up so late. You look marvellous."

"Mrs. Hall said I could stay until half past ten, as a treat. Mind you, mother always used to let me stay up until midnight. She said what did it matter what time children went to bed? If they're tired, she said, they'll sleep."

"Well, I suppose there's some sense in that," said Harry, whose own mother, a small plain woman who had always seemed to smell of lavender, had insisted that he was in bed by seven; so that he had often lain there under his cheap maroon blanket with the sun shining through the curtains, his younger brother fast asleep beside him, but his friends playing noisily in the street outside.

Lucille unselfconsciously linked arms with Harry and said, "You had think I'm a terrible person, do you?"

"No," said Harry. He didn't laugh at her for asking. There were times in everybody's life when they needed to know the answer to a question like that. "I think you're very thoughtful, and very nice; and besides all of that, I think you're very pretty, too."

"I suppose I'm too young for you to think of marrying me."

Harry looked down at her through his round spectacles, and there she was so rich and so young, with a way of life that Harry couldn't even start to imagine, in pieces all around her. She had drunk highballs in Paris, dressed in silk, eaten ortolan, and walked along the pathways of the Palace of Versailles in white organdie summer dresses. For a mother, she had once been blessed or cursed with one of the most fashionable and outrageous women of the 1920s. And here she was, at this noisy fancy-dress ball on the Arcadia, talking of marriage. To him, to Harry Pakenow.

He said, in a voice which was slightly hoarse, "I couldn't marry you, Lucille. I wish I could. I think you're the most beautiful girl on earth. You made a friend of me when nobody else would. You trusted me. You believed in me, too; and that's a lot more than most married people do."

Lucille stared up at him. "Mother always used to say that you can tell a good friend in the first minute you meet them."

"Mother was right. But I can only be your friend, nothing more. We don't belong in the same world, you and me. I've got other things to do with my life, apart from drinking champagne and dancing the fox-trot."

Lucille said, "I have, too. But sometimes I don't know what they are."

"You'll find out," Harry told her gently. "That's if there are any other things of course. There may not be. Some people are born to fox-trot, and nothing else. In which case, you'll have to kick up your heels, enjoy yourself, and make the best of it."

"You could come with us," said Lucille seriously.

"What do you mean?"

"Well... you could come with us to the Halls. They have a huge house. They're bound to need some extra help there. Then we could be together."

"I couldn't do that."

"Why not? They'd pay you well. I know Mrs. Hall is a bit funny sometimes, but she's quite nice really. Do say you'll come."

Harry thought of his thirty unexploded sticks of dynamite in the trunk of Mark Beeney's Marmon. He thought of his Socialist friends in New York, the Communists and the Wobblies. He thought of Janice, and the flat in Bootle, with the washing flickering through the hammered-glass window like a motion picture, except that it had sound. The sound of children playing in weedy Victorian gardens. The sound of electric trams, grizzling along the metal tracks to Liverpool. The sound of Janice singing.

He understood then that the rich had won. They would always win. They had won because they ruled the world in ways he had only been able to guess at. If you were too poor to be admitted to the right social and political clubs, if you were too poor to play checkers with the Mellons or dine with the Rockefellers; if you didn't have a mansion on Long Island and a string of thoroughbred racehorses in Kentucky; if you didn't own a Dodge motorboat or a Buhl Air-Sedan, then you were licked. A whisper in the right ear at the right club would always have a far more devastating effect on world affairs than the largest bomb. It didn't matter what you blew up. You could demolish the Woolworth Building, and Woolworth's would still go on making profits at their 1,200 five-and-dimes throughout the country. You could blow up the Arcadia, and luxury liners would still continue to cross the Atlantic. You could affect the way that rich people thought about life letting off bombs, certainly. You could frighten them. But their a resources of money made them adaptable beyond anything that the poor could dream of. If London was unsafe, they could always go and live in Paris. If Paris burned, then Biarritz.

Harry said to Lucille, "I don't know what I'm going to do."

"I wish you'd come," said Lucille. "You could always leave if you didn't like it. But I know you would."

"Do you think Mrs Hall—"

"Leave Mrs. Hall to me."

"Lucille—" said Harry, but she was already skipping off through the crowds with a wave of her fairy wand. Harry watched her disappear, and then snapped his fingers at a steward to bring him another glass of champagne. He felt ashamed as he took the glass; and the way the steward said obsequiously, "Thank you, sir," made him feel even worse. He felt like tugging the man's sleeve and saying, Don't call me sir. I'm just Harry. I'm the same as you. All right? But he knew that he would only make the steward feel worse, and make a fool of himself. He went over to one of the tables and took a blue cocktail cigarette out of a crystal holder. A steward instantly came across and lit it for him.

As he blew out smoke, he thought, I'm lost. And it was only when Sabran stared at him over his shoulder that he realised that he had spoken out loud.

The fancy-dress ball was an extravagant success. Before dinner, there was a parade in which everybody linked arms and strutted around the floor of the Grand Lounge to show off their costumes while the orchestra played Strauss marches, and the young girls who had danced at breakfast appeared in flower costumes and tossed over four hundred pounds' worth of purple orchids over them. Then the passengers went through to dinner, a fifteen-course, four-hour banquet that included consomme Fleury, deviled crabs a la creole, boiled cod in oyster sauce, samis of wild duck, boned capon truffee, ham with champagne sauce, broiled quails on toast, and strawberry Bavaroise.

Somehow, dressing up in fancy costumes made the first-class passengers all the more flirtatious, and even Sabran (who was dressed in scarlet tights, as a demon, with papier-mache horns and a silver-painted pitchfork) found enough courage to desert the baroness for twenty minutes and dance the apache with the prettiest of the blacked-up steppers. Ralph Peel, wearing furry donkey's ears, as Bottom, was escorting Louise Narron, in eight layers of white muslin, as Titania, in a manner which sob sister Marjorie Driscoll described in the Los Angeles Examiner as 'coochy'.

Edgar Deacon was dressed as a buccaneer, with a shabby black tricorn hat and a patch over his eye; Percy Fearson, hi a yellow silk turban, was Ali-Baba; and Claude Graham-White appeared in white cardboard armour as Parsifal. Lady Diana FitzPerry, apparently undaunted by her unsuccessful attempt to blackmail the Keys Shipping Line out of 6,000 pounds, made a stunning entrance in an extremely diaphanous pink organdie dress, with a coronet of golden leaves around her head, and a rather flaccid asp around her neck. Behind her, looking mournful and chastened, Lord Thomas FitzPerry wore only his formal supper dress.

Baroness Zawisza stunned the assembly by wearing almost nothing except two gold-painted leaves over her breasts, and a slightly larger gold-painted leaf between her legs, held with nothing but the thinnest gold ballet-shoe laces, and leaving her bottom quite bare. On her head she wore a pyramid of gold-painted apples; and on her feet the highest of golden slippers. To anyone who had the courage to inquire, she was attending the fancy-dress ball as the golden apples of the sun. Julius Briggs remarked that "only a lady so utterly confident of her beauty and her wealth could have appeared in company as naked as this; and the remarkable part about it was that in spite of the fact that she had quite a few of the gentlemen hi a tizzy, and scandalised one or two of the older women, most of the other ladies appeared to be covetously envious, as if they too had a secret dream of dining and dancing with practically nothing on at all."

As a couple, however, it was Catriona and Mark Beeney who entranced the company the most. Catriona had never felt so gracious or so pretty. Her crinoline gown was like a sparkling cloud of frost from which her narrow waist curved up in silk and lace, and her full breasts were cupped so high in the bones of her bodice that her ruby and diamond necklace, the necklace which Mark had given her, was spread out almost horizontally. The natural slant of her eyes had been accentuated by dark eye cosmetics, and by the height of her fancy wig.

Mark, at her side, looked taller and more dandified than ever, and he responded to the formality of his dress by behaving towards Catriona with even more courtesy and consideration than he usually did.

When they danced together around the Grand Lounge after dinner, Catriona held up her skirts and petticoats in one hand, while the other hand lightly rested on Mark's shoulder. The orchestra played "Tales from the Vienna Woods", beautifully and delicately, as it should be played, and with a zither, which most interpretations leave out. And a two or three other couples took to the floor, because the sight of Mark and Catriona together was a glittering picture which most of the passengers wanted to savour and remember.

Afterwards, Mark and Catriona went out on deck, to that small private corner behind the Palm Court where they could watch the Arcadia's phosphorescent wash on the indigo reaches of the sea. A steward brought them a bottle of Veuve Clicquot on a silver tray, and a selection of mints.

Catriona said, "This has been the most wonderful evening I can ever remember."

"Me too,"' said Mark. His face was in shadow, but she could tell by the warmth of his voice how much he meant it.

"Do you know something?" said Catriona. "I don't even care how long this lasts. Even if it lasts for tonight and no longer, that's all I want."

Mark took her in his arms and held her close. Then he lowered his head and kissed her, his firm tongue pushing deep into her mouth. She sucked at it, even nipped at it with her teeth, until they could both taste blood.

It was one of those kisses from which she wished she never had to emerge; and she wouldn't let him go. She gripped the hair at the back of his neck, and tugged and twisted at the braid on his jacket. Her eyes were closed, because she wanted to concentrate all of the feelings he gave her inside of her head, in that private blackness where her passion lived. He tasted irresistible, and she fed from his lips as if she were eating a sweet and narcotic fruit. She wanted him so much she could have devoured him. His fingers touched her cheek, and then a ran chillingly and thrillingly down the side of her neck; and when at last he slid his hand into the frilly bodice of her dress and held her bare nipple against the sensitive palm, she shivered and murmured and said, "Mark..." in that strange clotted voice that sleep talkers use.

For one second, her hand brushed against the swelling in his white britches, but then she knew she had to turn away and take a deep breath to control herself, because she could feel the breeze-cooled moisture in the silk between her warm thighs, and this time she knew how important it was to resist. There were too many other considerations. Too much business. Too many complications. To become Mark's mistress tonight would be to jeopardise everything that her father's death had given her.

Mark said, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," she told him. "Everything's exactly right."

He leaned his elbows on the rail. "You said you were a little bit frightened of me. I hope you're not a little bit frightened of yourself as well."

"Isn't everybody?"

"I don't know. Maybe so. The only thing that frightens me is the prospect of growing old."

Catriona picked up her glass of champagne. It was very dry, and very cold. The best champagne, one of Nigel's lounge-lizard friends had told her, should taste like the dust from an Egyptian's mummy's bandages.

"Growing old doesn't matter so much when you're rich," she said.

"On the contrary," said Mark. "I think it's far better to grow old when you're poor. Can you imagine the frustration of having millions and millions of dollars, and knowing that all of those millions can do nothing at all to hold back time and make you young again."

"You're being very morbid."

"Not really. I guess I'm just upset."

"Because of me?" asked Catriona.

"A little. I love you, but you seem to be keeping yourself aloof."

Catriona smiled at him. "I love you, too. I think you're the berries, if you must know. But there's all this business going on. You're trying to buy the Arcadia, and George Welterman's trying to buy us up completely, and I just need a little time to think."