The Ocean Liner

Southampton

Fanny Ward, now aboard the Manhattan, had not gone to dinner. She had provided her own nourishment in the form of a little hamper from Fortnum & Mason. Since Dotty’s death last year, she did not care for public appearances. The press conference she had given in the hotel had to be endured because one endured such things as part of one’s profession. But the death of a child changed one. One no longer wanted to see so much of the world. Or be seen by it.

The lovely Commodore Randall, whom she knew well, had made sure she’d got a cabin to herself, even if it was a tiny one. Such a gentleman, for all his saltiness. She appreciated such courtesies all the more now that fewer and fewer people knew who she was, The Eternal Beauty, The Perennial Flapper. The Girl Who Wouldn’t Grow Old.

But she had grown old.

She sat at her dressing table, pulling her rings off. There was something about fabulous diamonds on gnarled fingers that made one shudder. But that was what one was reduced to. The bare bones.

Some of those reporters had been laughing at her, she was sure of it. Not the laughter of delight, but mocking laughter. Did they know what she had been? That men had lost their reason over her, that she had been the most fashionable woman in London for a time, that she had been directed by Cecil B. DeMille? A few, perhaps.

As one aged, one entered a funnel. One’s circle of acquaintance shrunk, there were fewer people each year who had shared one’s life, who knew who one was. But the loss of a child was the most terrible thing of all.

Fanny removed her wig of chestnut curls and stored it carefully in its box. Her own hair, secured by a net, was now too sparse to bother dyeing, and lay lank and white across her skull.

At least Dotty had died a glamorous death. She had raised Dotty to understand the importance of glamour. And no death could be more glamorous than perishing beside one’s husband, the sixth Baron Plunkett, in a plane owned by William Randolph Hearst, on one’s way to stay as a guest at San Simeon. It would be talked of for years.

Of course, one didn’t like to dwell on the details. Dotty and Terence, trapped in the plane’s cabin, engulfed in flames. It didn’t do to look at the details of anything, really.

Fanny pulled off her false eyelashes carefully, her lids stretching into watery pouches as she did so. Of course the children would be well taken care of, raised by Lord Plunkett’s sister and brother-in-law. It simply hurt, that was all, to be left with the last years to fill, and no Dotty. Her love-child. The child of her great love.

Fanny wiped off her lipstick. The cupid’s bow vanished, leaving a thin, bitter gash. Running back to America was humiliating, but one was terrified of the bombing. Simply terrified. The last war had been bad enough. She’d come to London at the turn of the century, when things had got rather too hot for her in New York, and the last three decades had been marvellous, simply marvellous. But now they were over.

She didn’t expect that she would ever be back. Or that London would survive Hitler’s bombs. But one couldn’t say that, of course.

She wiped away the powder and rouge, watching in the mirror as her own face emerged, washed-out, haggard, unhappy.

For years they’d been asking her, what’s your secret, Miss Ward? Is it surgery? Do you eat monkey gland? Usually she told them it was a secret facial treatment passed on to her by Gaby Deslys, and available (for a substantial outlay) at her salon in Paris, in six weekly sessions.

The truth, of course, was that it was all simply an illusion, carefully maintained, and possible only because those charming gentlemen of the press participated in the conspiracy, printing photographs of her that were twenty years old, retouching negatives, lavishing lies on her. She hoped they would continue the conspiracy. It would be too tedious to have to grow old in public, as well as in private.

She rubbed cream into her face and hands. In the cruel light of the vanity mirror, this made her face gleam like a skull, her hands appear even bonier. Putting away her potions, she rose and removed her dress. With it came the strategically-sewn padding that had given her body its youthful curves. She hung the garment in the closet, and wrapped a dressing gown around herself.

Gaunt, frail and almost hairless, she opened the Fortnum’s hamper and investigated the contents. A game pie, a bottle of port, a cold chicken. She picked at the food with skinny fingers. She would take her teeth out after supper.

Alone in her own cabin, Carla Toscanini had also been thinking about the death of a child. But her Giorgio had died at the age of six, not in adulthood. Diphtheria had choked the innocent life out of him before he could even open his wings.

She had been four years married when she’d had Giorgio. Not yet twenty-three. And Arturo was already unfaithful to her.

She had discovered it through his carelessness, his arrogance. He had been receiving the woman’s love letters under a clownish assumed name at the local post office. It hadn’t taken Carla long to identify the woman: Rosina Storchio, the handsome young soprano whose vivid personality was propelling her to operatic stardom at that time.

But Arturo had not been interested in Rosina Storchio’s larynx. His interests had been in another organ altogether. The letters made that clear. Carla had confronted him with his treachery, screaming. It was a scene to be repeated many times over the course of their marriage, but this had been the first time, and she’d had a lot to learn. She’d still thought she could stop him.

Raging, she’d scoured every post office for miles around, hunting down his illicit correspondence. He’d simply used other anagrams of his name, even more clownish (Icinio Artú-Rostan and the like). She’d stood like an idiot, burning with humiliation, at the post restante counters, rifling through other peoples’ mail, looking for Storchio’s huge, extravagant calligraphy on the envelopes, while the postmasters watched her in mingled pity and scorn. It had been impossible to track down all Arturo’s aliases. She had followed his footsteps, dogged him for weeks. He had given her the slip every time.

It was a fire she couldn’t extinguish. He promised to renounce Storchio, swore on his mother’s soul she meant nothing to him. But he always found a way to go back to her.

He had been with Storchio when Giorgio had died, six years later. She’d had to face her child’s death alone.

Carla had never forgiven him for that. She should have left him then. But her heart was broken in so many pieces that she was half-dead with grief; and besides, she was expecting Wanda. Where would she go, with her belly out to here, and two children under ten years old?

Well, Rosina Storchio had had her punishments. The son she’d had with Arturo had been born crippled and paralysed, and had died at sixteen. Her voice, small to begin with, had disintegrated through over-use. She’d retired young, and it had been twenty years since anyone had heard of her. It was said that she too was now paralysed, living alone in obscurity. She’d never married.

Contemplating this litany of tragedy gave Carla no satisfaction. Her own pain was still too great to take pleasure in anyone else’s. But she felt that justice had been served.

She undressed now, hoping she would find sleep tonight. She had almost not come to Le Havre. Finding those filthy letters of Ada Mainardi’s had knocked her down, after so many times of being knocked down. She’d started to feel sure that her husband was now too old for these adventures. She’d been wrong.

She’d sat staring at the lake for days, stunned. The telegram boy had come climbing up to the house every day, with ever-more-frantic messages from Artú. She’d ignored them.

At length she had been forced out of her inertia by sheer self-preservation. Their landlord had implored her to pack up and go. If she did not leave Switzerland, he’d warned, she would spend the war here, possibly interned, separated from her children. There was no point in that.

She’d made a bonfire in the garden, and had burned much of the correspondence. Not only the handkerchiefs stained with Ada’s blood, and the little nosegays of hair tied artistically with silk thread, but other letters as well, from other women – because there had been those, too. Artú’s sexual energies, like all his other energies, were inexhaustible.

Even then, she had almost set off not west, to France, but south, to Milan. Yes; she’d contemplated taking her maiden name and slipping back into Italy, to sit out the war alone. Only the thought of the children had stopped her.

At sixty-three, her expression had grown severe, her features jowly. Her body was thickened, her temperament curdled. She no longer cared what she looked like, and habitually wore black. Heavy, heavy, she was heavy, her heart was heavy, her face and her life were heavy upon her.

She should have left Artú after Storchio, but there had been too many things stopping her.

Not any more. Enough was enough.

The next day, the air-raid drills were repeated. The guns began firing at nine in the morning. The children on board the Manhattan were wrought to a pitch of excitement by the commotion, running around howling, arms outstretched in imitation of fighter planes, or plummeting to the deck, trailing imaginary flames. For the adults, the exercise was more trying. Each blast made one’s body jerk involuntarily, or as Katharine Wolff put it more colloquially, jump out of one’s skin.

She and Stravinsky were breakfasting with Thomas König and the German girls who had caused such a scene yesterday. They were all jaded today, particularly the younger of the girls, who was clearly distressed by the guns.

‘I can’t bear to hear them any more,’ Masha said, covering her ears and shutting her eyes. ‘When will they stop?’

‘They are very disagreeable,’ Thomas said in his awkwardly formal way. He reached out to touch her hand in an oddly adult gesture of comfort.

‘I would have thought you would find them very agreeable indeed,’ Rachel snapped at him. She never missed a chance to attack the boy. ‘Isn’t this the very sound your Führer loves most?’

Stravinsky, wearing a black crew-necked sweater, seemed to find that amusing. ‘Ah yes, Thomas is a fervent little Nazi. You should hear him quoting passages from Mein Kampf. Explain, Thomas, what the Führer tells us about modern music.’

Thomas withdrew his hand from Masha’s. ‘The Führer tells us that modern music contains germs which are infecting our society, and by which we are bound to rot and perish,’ the boy said in a monotone, his face flushing scarlet, his eyes on his plate. He had been made to memorise these wisdoms at school, until his expulsion, and his youthful memory retained them; but having to trot them out in front of Masha and Rachel was excruciating.

‘You see?’ Stravinsky said to Rachel. ‘You and the Führer are agreed in your opinion of my music.’

‘I have never said any such thing,’ Rachel retorted. ‘I merely said I didn’t care for it.’

‘And tell us, Thomas,’ Stravinsky said with a malicious glint, ‘where does Hitler say we modern composers belong?’

Thomas gritted his teeth. ‘In a sanatorium.’

‘Once again we cannot fault the Führer’s prescience, for that is exactly where I have spent the last year. My late wife and daughter, indeed, spent most of their lives in a sanatorium.’ He turned to Masha. ‘Do you know Haute-Savoie, young lady?’

‘I have seen Mont Blanc,’ Masha said dully.

‘Ah yes. Very large. Very white. Our sanatorium lay at the foot. One opened the curtains and there it was. Very large. Very white.’ None of them was eating much, but Stravinsky was carefully peeling an apple with a little pearl-handled fruit knife. ‘It was a celebrated sanatorium. No less a person than Marie Curie came there. We used to see her, my wife and I, creeping into the sun to get warm. They were treating her for tuberculosis – Madame Curie, I mean – but the diagnosis was mistaken. She had given herself pernicious anaemia by the unwise habit of carrying radium around in her pockets. She died. Large doses of radiation, as with my music, are less healthy than small ones.’

‘You have a strange sense of humour,’ Rachel commented shortly.

‘I have no sense of humour at all. Thomas can attest to that. He relates to me all the Führer’s excellent jokes, but I am never amused. It must be a deficiency of intellect on my part.’

Rachel merely shook her head at Stravinsky’s whims. She watched Masha constantly, anxiously. She laid her hand on her cousin’s brow now. ‘You are hot. Are you getting a fever?’ Masha seemed not to hear, her face remaining desolate.

‘I understand that you two young people have studied music?’ Stravinsky said.

‘I studied at the violin faculty at the Conservatory in Leipzig for two years,’ Rachel replied. ‘But I was suspended on hygienic grounds.’

‘Your Jewishness was infectious?’

‘That is what they told me. Which was amusing, since the Conservatory was founded a hundred years ago by Felix Mendelssohn.’

‘A Jew. And now a banned composer, like myself. What does Hitler teach us about Jews and taste, Thomas?’

Thomas writhed. ‘There is no Jewish art,’ he replied automatically, the colour rising into his face again, ‘but the – the Jews have succeeded in poisoning public taste.’

‘There you have it. So much for Mendelssohn.’

‘I’ve often wondered why Hitler bothers himself about such subjects as music,’ Katharine said.

‘Because he is himself an artist,’ Stravinsky replied.

‘If he were really an artist,’ she said, ‘the world would be a safer place.’

Stravinsky shook his finger emphatically. ‘Oh no. Artists are the most dangerous people on earth. Your army general may kill a few thousand, but your artist thinks nothing of exterminating millions.’ He turned back to Rachel. ‘What about your young cousin, Fräulein Morgenstern? Is she musical, too?’

‘Masha is an amateur pianist of some talent. But she was not permitted to enter any conservatory. Also on the grounds of being infectious.’

‘Her lack of professional formation no doubt explains her dubious enthusiasm for my music.’ Having peeled the apple smoothly, he sliced it into four quarters, and gave one to each of the others. ‘If you find the time lying heavy on your hands, I have a little work for you.’

‘Work?’

‘I have with me the partial score of my symphony, but the manuscript is in rough, with all my corrections and scratchings-out. Perhaps I could prevail upon the two of you to copy the work out in fair?’

‘What will you pay?’ Rachel asked swiftly.

‘Rachel!’ Masha exclaimed in dismay, lifting her head. ‘It will be an honour to do the work – without pay, of course.’

‘You want payment in dollars, I presume?’ the composer asked Rachel, ignoring Masha.

‘Of course.’

‘Very well, I will pay fifty cents per manuscript page. There are some eighty pages. And I will subtract twenty-five cents for every error. Two errors, no pay. Three errors, you pay me.’

‘There will be no errors.’

‘That remains to be seen.’

‘And you will supply pens, ink and manuscript paper at no cost to us,’ Rachel pressed.

Masha, embarrassed by Rachel’s businesslike dealings, dug her fingers into her cousin’s arm. ‘We can find our own materials,’ she hissed.

‘I will supply materials,’ Stravinsky conceded. ‘But for any page that you spoil, you will pay me ten cents. Delivery to be before we dock in New York.’

Rachel held out her hand. ‘It’s a deal.’

They shook hands solemnly. ‘Thomas will bring the manuscript to your cabin this evening.’

‘I cannot believe, Igor,’ Katharine said quietly to him, ‘that you are entrusting your precious manuscripts to these perfect strangers. For all you know, they will sell them, and you will never see them again.’

‘Fräulein Morgenstern is completely honest,’ Thomas said sharply, glaring at Katharine. His face was now flushed with anger, rather than discomfort. ‘You have no right to doubt her.’

‘This is the first time I have heard a Nazi vouching for the honesty of a Jew,’ Katharine said in a dry voice.

Stravinsky smoothed his greasy, blonde hair wearily. ‘I am going back to bed. These guns tire my mind and make my head ache.’

As they all left the dining room, Rachel fell into step beside Stravinsky. ‘Was it your idea to send the Hitler Youth to our cabin the other night?’

‘Not at all. It was Thomas’s own idea. He’s not a bad fellow for a National Socialist.’

‘He’s infatuated with my cousin.’

‘I wouldn’t go as far as that.’

‘Haven’t you seen the way he moons over her?’ Rachel glanced over her shoulder. Thomas was walking close beside Masha behind them, listening intently to what she was saying. His face was rapt. ‘I find it repellent. Disgusting. He’s like a dog that licks one’s hand, but wants to bite.’

‘We all know that Nazis have sharp teeth,’ Stravinsky said, ‘but this one is just a puppy. You should be able to kick him away easily enough.’

‘I shall do my best,’ Rachel said grimly.

Thomas König arrived at the girls’ door, carrying a portmanteau holding Stravinsky’s manuscripts. The boy was awkward, as he always was in the girls’ presence. Rachel greeted him coldly, but Masha invited him eagerly into the little cabin.

‘Imagine, Rachel. Original manuscripts from the hand of Igor Stravinsky!’

‘Just imagine,’ Rachel said ironically. ‘Let’s hope the great man is neat in his writing.’

‘He’s always so neat in his personal appearance. Quite fastidious, isn’t he, Thomas?’ She patted the place next to her on the bunk. ‘Sit here beside me.’

The boy obeyed, pressing his hands between his knees. Rachel opened the portmanteau reverently. The sheaves of pages inside were densely written, with plentiful crossings-out and scribbled lines in French and Russian. Odd bits of paper, scraps of envelopes and even margins torn from magazines, were glued here and there with lines of music scribbled on them.

‘Oh, what a lot of dots,’ Rachel commented sardonically.

Thomas cleared his throat. ‘Herr Stravinsky says you need not copy out his annotations. Only the staves.’

‘My heart is beating fast,’ Masha said, handling the pages as though they were holy writ. ‘This is such a privilege!’

Thomas glanced at her face, and then away again. He found being in this cabin, with its scents, its articles of feminine clothing strewn around, and above all, the proximity of Masha Morgenstern, overwhelming. His heart, like Masha’s, was beating fast.

‘You have removed your swastika badge,’ Rachel said, looking down at him.

‘Yes, Fräulein.’

‘Are you disobeying your mother’s wishes out of sensitivity for our feelings?’

He swallowed. ‘I know that the Fräuleins find it distasteful.’

‘You needn’t bother on our account. We are Germans, like yourself, and quite used to seeing the thing everywhere one looks. Put it back on.’

‘It’s quite all right.’

‘It is not all right,’ Rachel snapped. ‘In Germany, we are obliged to wear a yellow star so that the world can see we are Jews. I don’t see why you shouldn’t wear a swastika to tell the world you are a Nazi. Put it back on.’

‘Leave him alone,’ Masha said.

‘Why should I leave him alone? Put it on, I say.’ She watched while Thomas, his fingers shaking somewhat, fished the pin from his pocket and reattached it to his lapel. ‘We are also obliged to change our names to “Sara” or “Israel”. I think we should call you “Adolf” from now on.’

‘He’s just a boy,’ Masha said, leafing through the manuscript, her soft brown hair falling around her face. ‘He doesn’t understand these things.’

‘He understands, all right. Don’t you, Adolf?’

‘I understand,’ Thomas said, almost inaudibly.

‘Look at the facility with which Stravinsky writes,’ Masha exclaimed. ‘It simply pours out of him, wherever he is. He scribbles on whatever comes to hand. Can you imagine having such a quantity of beauty in your head?’

‘I can’t imagine transcribing such a quantity of rubbish at fifty cents a page,’ Rachel retorted. ‘I hope you’re going to do the lion’s share. I have better things to do.’

‘But what if I make mistakes?’

‘Then you will pay for them. You heard the great Stravinsky-Korsakoff.’

‘If the Fräulein wishes,’ Thomas said in a small voice, ‘I can check the pages for any errors.’

‘You’re very sweet, Thomas,’ Masha said, laying her hand on the boy’s knee. He started as though he had been burned with a red-hot iron.

‘You’re not going to disembark – are you?’ he said in a whisper, his pale grey eyes fixed on hers.

Masha sighed. ‘I’ve been told that I can’t.’ She smiled sadly at Thomas. ‘I still have your ticket to the World’s Fair. I can’t really keep it, you know. I’ll give it back to you.’

Thomas felt a flutter of dismay. The ticket was his only, tenuous link to Masha once they arrived in America. ‘Oh no. It’s yours. I beg you to keep it. You don’t have to go with me. You can go any day you choose.’

Rachel was observing the boy narrowly. ‘Young Adolf is in love with you, Masha.’

At once, the blood rushed into Thomas’s face, reaching the roots of his hair. Rachel laughed mockingly. Masha shot her a reproving glance, and then patted Thomas on the knee again. ‘Pay no attention to her. She’s a dreadful tease.’

But Rachel’s malice – or perhaps that gentle hand on his knee – was too much for Thomas. He jumped to his feet, made them a bow, and hurried out of the cabin.

‘You’re cruel, Rachel,’ Masha said. ‘Why do you torment him?’

‘I hate the sight of him. Besides, it gives me a little pleasure.’

‘He’s a sensitive boy.’

‘Oh, very. He has the hots for you.’

‘Really, Rachel. It’s nothing so adult as “having the hots”. And it’s a reason to show him some consideration.’

‘There was a dwarf in our apartment building in Leipzig. She was tiny, like a child, even though she was thirty years old, with little stunted arms and legs. But do you know, Masha, she could play the violin with surpassing sweetness. I don’t think I ever heard a sweeter tone. She asked me to give her lessons from time to time. Her arms were too short to hold the violin under her chin, so she played it like a cello. They came for her, the SS men, and took her away.’

‘I don’t want to hear any more horrible stories,’ Masha said, with tears in her eyes.

‘They didn’t show her much consideration. I saw two of them swinging her like a sack between them, laughing on the way to the van. I said nothing, because I knew I would be next. By now she has been exterminated. Don’t waste your pity on that boy. He’ll be back in Germany baiting Jews while you and I are begging for our bread on the streets of New York.’

‘If we do this work of Stravinsky’s, we’ll have at least forty dollars more,’ Masha said, wanting to get Rachel off such bitter subjects. ‘Shall we make a start?’

‘And by the way,’ Katharine pointed out sharply, ‘you can ill afford forty dollars for a task you don’t need doing.’

‘It will be useful to have fair copies of those two movements.’

‘I happen to know that fair copies of those two movements have already been sent to your publisher.’

‘Exactly. That is why I require further fair copies for myself.’

She snorted at this prevarication. ‘Those forty dollars would have bought you a Cabin Class ticket.’

‘I am happy with my cabin.’ He was playing patience in the Tourist Class smoking room, his legs wrapped in a rug, a cigarette in a holder clamped between his teeth. From time to time, when he was frustrated by the way the cards turned out, he muttered filthy expletives in Russian, imagining that she couldn’t understand. ‘There is nothing wrong with the cabin at all.’

‘And what about the food?’

‘I have never been very interested in food.’

‘Nonsense, Igor,’ she said roundly. ‘You know you are a gourmet.’

‘Shit on your mother,’ he muttered to the cards in Russian.

‘I understand what you are saying. I have enough Russian for that. And I see you cheating.’

Irritably, he gathered up the cards and shuffled the deck. ‘How can I play, with you sitting there like a crow, pecking at me?’

‘If you wanted to give those women charity, you could have just handed them the cash. You didn’t have to risk your precious autograph manuscripts.’

‘It is not a question of charity,’ he replied, starting to lay out a new game. ‘It’s a business transaction.’

She lit a cigarette and began to buff her nails. ‘You are absurdly trusting.’

Thomas König arrived at their table, his pale face set. ‘I gave them the portmanteau.’

‘Good boy.’

‘Why do you always repeat that I am a Nazi to them?’ he asked tensely.

Stravinsky looked up, adjusting his spectacles. ‘But you are. Aren’t you?’

‘You make them hate me. Especially the older one.’

‘Is that not in the natural order of things?’

‘It’s hard for me.’

‘And yet you must bear it,’ Stravinsky replied with a warning note in his voice. ‘You have no choice.’

‘You could at least not make a point of it every chance you get.’

‘I don’t think they need reminding of what you are. And my advice to you is not to annoy the elder Fräulein Morgenstern. She has a very sharp tongue.’

Thomas grimaced and walked off without replying.

‘What was that all about?’ Katharine asked.

Stravinsky returned to his cards. ‘I suspect he has formed a sentimental attachment to one of the Jewesses.’

‘How ironic. The softer one, I should guess.’

‘Indeed, the other is something of a virago.’

‘I hope he doesn’t have any expectation of it being reciprocated.’

‘I shouldn’t imagine he is so foolish. He worships from afar. He is considerably younger, in any case.’

‘I don’t like him.’

‘Is he not a man and a brother?’

‘He is merely your cabin-mate.’

‘Indeed. On life’s journey, like us all. He will learn from us and we will learn from him. Aha.’ Chewing on his cigarette holder with satisfaction, he began to move the cards around successfully. ‘You note I am not cheating. Please do not tell me when I win that I have used underhand means.’

Masha had worked for much of the night on the Stravinsky score. Rachel had been wise enough to leave her to it. Despite being rudely awoken by the anti-aircraft batteries, after having got to sleep only a couple of hours earlier, Masha was ready for breakfast, and full of the music she had been transcribing.

‘You can have no idea how wonderful it is,’ she exclaimed to her cousin as they made their way to the dining room.

‘Is it the roaring of lions or the trumpeting of elephants?’

‘Neither. It’s the most elegant, refined music you ever heard – well, since Beethoven, anyway.’

‘Since Beethoven!’

‘It’s full of enchanting rhythmic variations. And Rachel, it’s so clever.’

‘Oh, I am sure it is clever.’

‘And witty.’

‘I will tighten my stays before reading it, so as not to break a rib laughing.’

As they made their way to the dining room, they encountered Arturo Toscanini, walking at great speed, as always. He almost collided with them, and began to utter curses in Italian, before his dark eyes, flashing beneath his tangled eyebrows, registered who they were.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, pulling himself up. ‘The beautiful signorine.’ He lifted his hat and showed his brownish teeth in a smile. ‘Buongiorno, buongiorno! ’

‘Good morning, maestro,’ Masha replied.

Toscanini took Masha’s hand in both of his and raised it to his lips. ‘I was told of your unhappy news. I offer my condolences.’

‘How kind of you, maestro,’ Masha said, moved by this attention from the great man. Rachel, however, remained tight-lipped.

Toscanini pressed another kiss on Masha’s knuckles, his eyes fixed hypnotically on hers. ‘That mean little man in his ridiculous chauffeur’s uniform! How I loathe him.’

‘Do you mean Hitler?’ Masha asked timidly.

‘They asked me to return to Bayreuth in 1933, to conduct The Ring. With Hitler sitting in the front row? The bloated Goering beside him? And that hideous gnome Goebbels on the other side? Never!’ He kissed Masha’s hand again. ‘They sent me ten thousand Deutschmarks. I sent them back. Hitler himself wrote to me, pleading. Do you know what I told him?’

‘What?’ Masha asked breathlessly.

‘I told him, Toscanini says Tosca-no-no!’ He burst out laughing. ‘What has Wagner to do with Hitler?’

‘Quite a lot, it seems,’ Rachel put in dryly. ‘The effect of the former on the latter is noxious. I sometimes ask myself whether the war would have started if Hitler hadn’t been such a regular visitor at Bayreuth.’

Toscanini, who had still been pressing kisses on Masha’s hand, threw it down furiously. His face flushed dangerously. ‘Wagner expresses all that is sublime in the human condition,’ Toscanini thundered, ‘Hitler all that is most execrable.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Masha exclaimed, thrilling to the conductor’s fiercely curling moustaches and flashing eyes.

Toscanini shook his finger in Rachel’s face. ‘Do not blame the composer of Parsifal for Hitler!’ He pushed past the girls and hurried away on his peregrinations.

‘The maestro is so fiery, isn’t he?’ Masha said in awe.

‘Half-mad, you mean,’ Rachel commented.

They arrived at their table to find Stravinsky, Katharine Wolff and Thomas König already seated. The boy got up with perfect manners, his eyes flicking apprehensively from Rachel to Masha.

‘I’ve been copying out your manuscript, Monsieur Stravinsky,’ Masha said eagerly.

‘I hope you are not making expensive mistakes,’ Stravinsky said, looking at her from under hooded eyelids.

‘Oh no, I’m being very careful. But the music is so classical in form. It’s nothing like The Rite of Spring.’

‘My dear, it’s at least fifteen years since I began composing in the neo-classical style, and at least twenty-five since I wrote The Rite of Spring. Are you disappointed?’

‘Not at all. The music is wonderful. I’m surprised, that’s all.’

‘My life has been a long vista of surprised faces,’ he replied. ‘Unpleasantly surprised, I might add. They complained when I wrote new music, and said they wanted to hear classical forms. Now that I write classical forms, they complain and say they want to hear new music again. But one thing I cannot do is go backwards. I cannot be false to my aspirations.’

‘Of course not,’ Masha said, shocked at the idea. They ordered breakfast, and Masha and Stravinsky entered into a discussion of the accented off-beats in the music she was copying.

‘Have you seen what your great army is doing to Poland, Adolf?’ Rachel asked Thomas. ‘You must be very proud.’

‘It’s pitiful,’ Katharine said. ‘I was in tears in the night, listening to Polish Radio on my short-wave. They put on a Chopin nocturne. I had to switch it off. I couldn’t bear it. Even the women in my cabin were crying, and God knows they’re not sensitive souls. That poor, tragic country! Between Stalin and Hitler, God help them.’

Thomas stared at his plate, pale-faced as the two women discussed the invasion. The dining room was completely full, and passengers were crowding at the doors, demanding tables. The overtaxed stewards were pleading in vain for them to form orderly lines. Those who had tables were shouting impatiently for food, which was emerging all too slowly from the kitchen. The crash of dropped crockery was becoming more frequent, the atmosphere more charged.

The SS Manhattan had been in Southampton harbour for a week already, and passengers were still coming aboard along the steep, narrow gangway, a steady flow of humanity, or as Dr Emmett Meese indignantly put it, human garbage.

Those already on board were showing signs of strain. Some, like Rachel and Masha Morgenstern, who had embarked in Bremen, had already been on the ship for a fortnight, and felt themselves to be choked by the ship’s surroundings. These prolonged stays in port were hard to bear.

The sound of a bell cut through the hubbub. The public address system crackled.

‘Attention all passengers. This is the chief purser. The Manhattan will be sailing tomorrow morning at oh-six-hundred hours.’

There was a moment of silence. Then the entire dining room erupted into cheers. The purser could barely be heard announcing that all passengers had to be on board by eleven p.m., and all visitors had to have left the ship by the same time, and repeating the announcement in French and German.

Masha looked at Thomas and saw the tears running down his cheeks. She rose quickly from her chair and put her arms around him. She had made up her mind to be especially kind to him, even if Rachel enjoyed sharpening her claws on him. He was just a boy, and his solicitude had touched her.

‘Don’t cry, Thomas. You’ll be at the World’s Fair very soon.’

Enveloped in her warmth and fragrant softness, Thomas had no words. She kissed his cheek and gave him her handkerchief, which he pressed to his face with both his hands.