Maiden Voyage

SIX

It was the summer of 1924. In England, bright young men were striding about in those voluminous grey-flannel trousers known as Oxford bags. In France, Gloria Swanson was being courted by her husband-to-be, the Marquis at la Falaise de la Coudray. It was the summer of mah-jongg, crossword puzzles, and the last fading popularity of "Yes, We Have No Bananas'. On the day that Stanley Keys died, the Republican Convention in Cleveland nominated Calvin Coolidge to be their Presidential candidate for the November elections.

The mood in the world was changing. There was fresh frivolity, fresh hope, silly songs, rolled-down stockings. The Prince of Wales visited Long Island and spent most of his time dancing, playing polo, or motorboating. A new movie was advertised as featuring "beautiful jazz babes, champagne baths, petting parties in the purple dawn'. Two rich and spoiled young men called Leopold and Loeb murdered an innocent boy named Bobby Franks for the sheer hell of it, and escaped with life sentences.

It was all so different from the summer of 1920. Harry Pakenow, for one, knew just how much, and could never forget.

On Saturday morning, June 14th, Harry was standing in the kitchen of a narrow Victorian terraced house in Bootle, not far from Liverpool, frying himself some breakfast.

He was bespectacled, narrow-chested, with spiky hedgehog hair; but he had an attractive vulnerability about him, an apparent helplessness that made him immediately magnetic to shopgirls and waitresses and even to the fat ladies who stood behind the jellied-eel stalls in Bootle market. He was the kind of young man that almost every woman over thirty wanted to take home and mother.

Harry was originally from Hoboken, New Jersey, although he had been living near Liverpool for so long now that his accent had almost completely flattened out. Just like a Liverpudlian, he said "sters" instead of "stairs', and came out with phrases like "Chance'll be a fine thing" and "Did he heck as like'. In his rolled-up shirtsleeves, yellow suspenders and baggy pants, he looked like any other clerk for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company: he even had mauve indelible ink on his fingers.

Harry fried his two eggs and his single rasher of bacon in his charred-black frying pan with the wonky handle, while outside the window the sheets of the woman who lived upstairs snapped and billowed on the line (she had no husband to speak of, and a ten-year-old boy mysteriously called Romulus who wet the bed). He whistled a jazz refrain that had been popular when he was last in New York in September, 1920: "The Fall I Fell For You'.

From the next room, a girl's voice called, "Harry? Have you seen my pink shoes?"

"You left them in the outhouse," he called back. "There was dogshit on them."

"Oh, bugger it. Didn't you clean them for me?"

Harry didn't answer. He turned off the gas, and then carried the frying pan across to the kitchen table, where an empty plate was waiting, already flanked by two doorstep slices of bread and butter and a mug of bright orange tea. He shovelled his eggs and bacon onto his plate, and then sniffed and sat down to eat. He would take a mouthful of egg, a big bite of bread, and then wash everything down with tea, in that order. He was indistinguishable from any other British working man at his breakfast.

"I'll be late, Harry," said a pretty young girl in a short pink and white dress, hopping into the kitchen in one slipper. She had bright blonde hair, spiky eyelashes, and two vivid spots of rouge on her cheeks. She had read how to make herself up like that in Movie Secrets.

"If you think I'm going to go scraping dogshit off your shoes right in the middle of breakfast, you can think again," Harry told her.

"But it's five past eight already. Mrs Carson will kill me."

"Let her kill you. If she kills you, you can sue."

"Oh, you're not much bleeding help, are you? I shall have to change my dress now, and wear my green ones."

"Green," said Harry, mopping up egg-yolk, as if that was the most obnoxious word he'd heard for a week.

But when the pretty young girl came dancing in a few moments later, all ready for work in a green shimmy dress and a green headband, Harry reached out and grabbed her arm, sat her down on his lap and kissed her.

"One day," he told her, staring at her intently through his bacon-spattered spectacles, "one day you'll understand just how much you've done for me, Miss Janice Bignor, of Bootle."

Janice tugged at his hair, and kissed him back. "It's mutual, innit?" she told him. "Now, I've got to run for that bleeding bus, or else she really will kill me."

Harry followed her to the front door in his carpet slippers and watched her run down the sloping windy road to the bus stop on the corner. The woman next door, with a scarf on her head and a I hanging out of her mouth, was scratching at her corsets in her front window. When she saw Harry looking, she scowled. Harry smiled and went back inside.

He always felt that the house was quiet and unsettled without Janice. Whenever she went to work on Saturday mornings, leaving him alone, he would prowl around for almost half an hour, taking three times as long as usual to clear up his breakfast plate and to tidy a narrow brass bed in which they slept together in what had once been the "best parlour'. There was still "best parlour" wallpaper on the walls—faded brown flowers, with a green and brown border a way round.

Today, before he went back to the kitchen, he went into the bedroom and pulled out from under the bed a small tin box with a padlock. He found the key in his trouser pocket, and unlocked it and then laid out on the rumpled bedspread the three most important papers in his whole life as if they were tarot cards.

On the right was a third-class ticket for passage to New York on the SS Arcadia's maiden voyage, on Tuesday, June 17th. In the centre was an American passport, its olive-green cover circled by teacup stains. On the left was a yellowed newspaper clipping from The New York Times of September 17th, 1920.

The newspaper clipping described how at 11.59 in the morning September 16th, a horse-drawn wagon loaded with dynamite and scrap iron had exploded at Broad and Wall Streets, outside the offices J. P. Morgan & Company, the merchant bankers, killing thirty-eight people and injuring hundreds more. Windows had been smashed for blocks around, and an iron bolt had been driven through the window of the Bankers Club, on the thirty-fourth floor of the Equitable Building. The street had been glossed red with the blood of the dead and the dying.

Harry touched each of these papers with his fingertips, in the way that mediums familiarise themselves with their tarot cards. This, the explosion on Wall Street, is what came before. This, the passport, represents the means to the end. And this, the third-class ticket on the Arcadia's maiden voyage, is the significator.

Outraged, the press and the police had assumed at once that the Wall Street explosion bad been the work of Bolshevists. Their wild investigations had led them around and around in circles for days, and then months, and then years. Detectives had discovered that the iron bolts which had penetrated the buildings all around were window sash-weights, cut in two. Next, they had examined every single fragment of the remaining scrap-iron, including the shoes of the blown-up horse. The most promising piece had been the knob of a safe door, which had been traced by a particularly dogged detective from the day of its manufacture, from America to France, and then back again. But the trail had gone cold in Hoboken, New Jersey, at a scrap dealer on Willow Avenue. He sold scrap by the fifty-ton load, "Who knows what they're going to use it for?"

It had taken a long time for the echoes of the Wall Street explosion to fade away. But now the Red Scare of 1919 and the early 1920s was old news, and the Communist purges first incited by A. Mitchell Paltner, President Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, were filtering for lack of genuine evidence against the suspected revolutionaries, and even more from lack of public interest. Jazz, sex, Rudolph Valentino, and the Ku Klux Klan were all much more exciting than Bolshevists with beards. The thirty-eight victims of the blast had long been buried, the injured had recovered, and a supposed Red who had tried to blow up A. Mitchell Palmer's house had only succeeded in blowing himself up instead.

In nearly four years, nobody had discovered that the perpetrator of the explosion was Harry Pakenow, one-time economics student, and by far the most active and aggressive member of a society called Young American Workers. To Harry, the capitalist institutions of Wall Street had been, and still were, a grotesque affront to the working men of America. Behind those facades, fat and uncaring, the capitalists gorged themselves on fine foods at the expense of the ordinary man. Harry still felt angry when he thought of all those workers who had been unjustly arrested and imprisoned under suspicion of being "sinister and subversive agitators'. He had been to Boston in 1920 after one of Palmer's raids and seen how a hundred men had been kept prisoner in a bull-pen measuring thirty feet by twenty-four feet for a whole week; and he had read in the papers how men from Hartford had been beaten by police and humiliated in front of their families. All because they were suspected Reds.

Harry wasn't violent by nature. He had never punched anyone, not very hard anyway, and he was always telling Janice that he would much rather argue than fight. Janice, of course, had no idea of what he had done, or why. But when he was a boy, Harry had seen his father sacked from his job at the Nagel shoe factory for going to listen Eugene Debs preaching socialism from his "Red Special" train, in the marshalling yard at Paterson; and he had known the meaning of Wobbly before he had understood long division. Harry came from tough stock. His father had worked hard and well, cutting leather patterns for Oxford brogues, but had believed implicitly in the Wobblies" uncompromising slogan, "Good Pay Or Bum Work'. His mother had kept the family together, God knows how, when there was no money and no credit and nothing left to hock. Harry always ate a rasher of bacon for breakfast these days, because when he was a boy there had never been any bacon, ever. He had seen a newspaper cartoon in 1912 of "Capitalism" in the shape of a grossly distended hog sprawling over the mines and the factories and the legislatures of America, and he had promised himself, tight-fisted, that as soon as he could afford to buy bacon he would personally devour that hog, slice by slice.

He put away his papers and his tin box, straightened the bedcover, and then went into the kitchen to put on the kettle for a fresh cup of tea. He could make tea like an Englishman now: warming the thick brown china teapot first, then adding one teaspoonful of tea per person, and one for luck. It seemed strange that he would probably never come back to England again, even if he survived.

His Arcadia plan had come to him almost a year ago, when she had been launched from John Brown's shipyard on the Clyde. The Arcadia had been described in Keys Shipping advertising as "the last word in de luxe travel ... a city afloat, in which the scintillating manners and style of high society of both continents will be the order of the day, and of the night..." A first-class suite, one way, would be priced at $4,118, a couple of hundred dollars more than the Aquitania.

When Harry had read about the dancing and the parties and the luxury foods that would be taken aboard for each voyage, he had felt bitter to the point of illness. He had left his supper of herring and boiled potatoes untouched. It wasn't that he was personally jealous of the rich. He didn't crave luxury for himself. It was simply that he couldn't bear the manifest injustice of one man, in one meal, pushing into his face food that would have fed a whole working-class family for a whole day; and spending on a week's accommodation the same amount of money that would have enabled that same family to buy their apartment outright and live rent-free for the rest of their lives.

The kettle started to boil and he made his pot of tea. Outside in the yard, the woman from upstairs was unpegging her sheets. Her grey-streaked hair flapped in the breeze, and her face looked impossibly careworn, as creased as the tissue-paper they used for wrapping shoes in. He thought it was both sad and strange that she would still be here, pegging and unpegging these sheets, long after he had gone.

He didn't particularly want to be a martyr, but he knew what he ad to do. He had to strike again at the heart of capitalism, violently and expressively. The junction of Wall Street and Broad Street had been the very nub of capitalism on land; the Arcadia symbolised it on the high seas.

Janice had sensed that Harry had changed in recent weeks, become tenser, as the date for the maiden voyage came nearer. But she had never sought explanations from him. He would miss Janice, in the same way that he would miss the narrow Victorian streets of Bootle, and the meat pies, and the warm beer at twopence a pint. He would miss the rain. England had a kind of gritty reality about it that he had never experienced anywhere else, even in Hoboken. You were allowed to be as mad as you liked in England, and nobody cared. That was what made it so real; you could keep your own sense of reality intact, no matter how potty that sense of reality actually might be.

He had not yet made up his mind how real the moment was going to be when he detonated thirty sticks of dynamite in the cargo hold of the Arcadia, but it was enough for him to know that he was going to do it.

The woman from upstairs tapped on the window and said, "Harry, love? Are you going out this morning?"

He raised his mug. "After my tea."

"Would you get us a packet of five Woodys, please? I'll pay you Thursday."

He paused, sipped his tea, and then said, "Okay." He rather liked the idea that he wouldn't be here to collect his money.

It was beginning to shower with rain as he banged the front door of the house behind him and started to walk down the road. He wore a brown tweed cap and a thin brown overcoat with a belt. The rain speckled his glasses. On the corner, an old man sitting on a front-garden wall waiting for the Liverpool motor-bus said, "Aye up."

Harry thought about Janice as the bus ground its way slowly southward down the wet lengths of Stanley Road and Scotland Road. He had met Janice his first week in England, in the comb and brush department of Wavertree's, the gloomy Edwardian department store him she still worked. He had been making his way from counter to counter stocking up with all of those things that he had left behind in New York when he escaped. Toothbrush, shirt, pyjamas, socks. The Young American Workers had got up a collection and given him $108 getaway money.

Janice had been living at home with her mother then, after leaving her new husband of only three weeks. She was only just twenty now; she had been a chubby seventeen when she had been taken to the altar of St. Matilda's Church by a nineteen-year-old butcher's assistant to become Mrs. Philip Snowball.

Philip Snowball's idea of what a wife should expect out of married life had been washing and ironing his shirts, cooking his tea, and staying at home darning his mustard-soled socks while he went out in the evening and got so drunk that he vomited into the fireplace. He had never touched her, Philip Snowball, not once. He probably hadn't even known what to do.

Harry, isolated in Liverpool, worried, confused, had asked Janice to step out with him just for the sake of having someone young and friendly to talk to. He had taken her to a restaurant and bought a a pork chop with apple stuffing, and a cup of tea. She had never met a man as gentle and yet as individual as him before. That night, back at her mother's house, with no light but the glow of the dying coals on the kitchen range, and no perfume but the lingering sprats from her old dad's supper, they had made love sitting on a plain wooden chair, she with her plump thighs wide apart, he with his eyes tight shut and his spectacles on the table next to the cheese.

Janice didn't want anything from Harry but love. He wondered what she would think when she came back from work on Tuesday and found him gone.