Graham Masterton MAIDEN VOYAGE

Passengers will remember how romantically the glowing phosphorescent waves curled back in the ship's wake, falling forever in flakes of diamond and pearl. They will remember how readily the damsel of their choice could be persuaded to a secluded spot in order to observe this poetic phenomenon. They will remember quite a lot of things, we have no doubt.

— Cunard advertisement

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.

TWO

Her mother was resting in the day room when Catriona arrived home. She was propped up in a white-painted basketwork chair with far too many cushions, and she was wearing a tiny and menacing pair sunglasses, presumably to hide her swollen eyes. She had just finished a mug of Home & Colonial Beef Tea, but she hadn't been able to touch the ham salad that cook had prepared for her.

The day room had always been her mother's room; it was a small pretty parlour with French windows which gave out on to a flight of stone steps, and on to that part of the garden which her father had always liked to call the nattery—where Mother's friends would gather on summer afternoons to natter. Unlike almost every other room in the house, there were no etchings or oil paintings of ships in the day room, just pink flowery wallpaper and gilded mirrors. In the corner stood an unfinished embroidery of Balmoral Castle.

"You came, darling," Catriona's mother cried tearfully, lifting her hands. "Oh, my dear Catriona, they brought you back."

Catriona crossed the room and knelt beside her mother's chair. They embraced each other, tightly and awkwardly. Catriona stroked her mother's auburn-tinted hair, and scratched her hand on one of her mother's diamond combs. Her mother wept and trembled in a tussle of frustration and grief, and Catriona knew that there was nothing she could say or do to help her, not now, and maybe not ever. Her father had been the firm ground on which her mother had walked, and the vault of heaven above her head. His death had been more than the loss of a husband: it had been the sudden and utter vanishing of every recognisable landmark in her life. It was as if she had been abruptly blinded as she was walking across an unfamiliar pasture.

"I was afraid you weren't going to cuh-uh-ome," sobbed her mother. She had to take off her dark spectacles to dab at her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief. "After what happened last time, well, I just didn't know."

"Mother, of course I came," Catriona soothed her. She took her hand and squeezed it twice. Her mother's hands were knobbly with diamond and sapphire rings—ugly Victorian rings that were probably worth thousands and thousands of pounds. She always wore them, and even today she hadn't forgotten to put them on. But her dress was plain and unfamiliar and black, with a jet brooch at her neck, and double pleats of black lace over the bust, and she wore black shoes and black stockings. Her mother had always looked like Catriona expected she would look in twenty years' time, and somehow the black dress reinforced that impression. A black and white photograph from tomorrow.

"Is Isabelle here?" asked Catriona. "I saw the Crossley parked outside."

"Mr. Fearson sent her a telegraph very first thing," said her mother. "She's having a light supper now, with Mrs Brackenthorpe. She's been wonderful, of course. Everybody's been wonderful. But your poor father, my darling. It was such a shock. And so young, and so vigorous."

"Hush, mother," said Catriona, but her mother didn't seem to hear her.

"He went to church as regularly as anyone," she said. "Every Sunday, Holy Communion and Evensong, both. So how could the Lord have taken him so young? Only fifty-three! His life only two-thirds lived! And to think of the sinners and the ruffians who live to a ripe old age, and have never once seen the inside of a chapel! That's what I've been asking myself today. How could the Lord have taken so obedient a servant so young?"

Catriona stood up, and brushed her skin straight. "Mother," she said, "you really must try to rest. It's no good thinking about why Father died. You have to start thinking about helping yourself now. That's the way he would have wished it, wouldn't he?"

Her mother let out a wretched sob, her lips as wet as a child's. How do I know what he would have wanted? He never told me what he wanted. He was just there."

"Mother, rest. I'll see if Isabella can get something to help you sleep."

"Sleep? How can I sleep? The last time I slept, I woke up to find that I'd lost the only person I've ever cared about. I never want to sleep again."

"Mother," said Catriona, and bent forward to hug her mother very close to her. "I do love you, Mother."

At that very moment the door opened and Isabelle came in with a piece of blackberry and apple pie on a plate. When she saw the uneaten salad and Catriona, she said, "Oh," in an affronted tone, as if all of her painstaking nursing was being thrown back in her face. Isabelle was her mother's younger sister, a narrower, thinner, sourer version of her mother, with skimpier hair, a sharper nose, smaller breasts, and bonier ankles; Catriona's father always used to say that when Isabelle had been younger, she had been "quite a dazzler". But care and jealousy had prematurely worn her out, while Catriona's mother, by contrast, had grown smooth-faced and placid.

"You're going to have to eat something sometime, you know, dear," said Isabelle. "And cook did make a special effort to give you something light and tasty. Hallo, Catriona. I'm surprised to see you back so prompt."

"My father's dead," said Catriona, simply, standing up straight.

Isabelle ignored her. "You really ought to make an effort with the salad, dear," she persisted. "Cook will be frightfully hurt if you don't even make an effort."

Catriona's mother looked sideways at her supper tray. Catriona said, "You don't have to eat it if you don't want to, Mother. I don't think ham salad is the best antidote to grief, anyway."

Catriona's mother continued to stare at the supper tray, and two large tears rolled out from under her dark glasses and down her cheeks. She was thinking, probably, as Catriona was thinking, that this was the first supper she was having to eat without her husband. Her first supper alone, and all of those lonely suppers ahead of her, for the rest of her life. She could never conceive of marrying anyone else. What other man was so much a part of the fabric and the firmament of Formby; what other man was big enough to build the world's largest passenger liner and still care for everything that his wife wished for?

"I'll send Gwen for the tray, then," said Isabelle.

Catriona said clearly, "No, Aunt Isabelle. Please I'd really appreciate it if you took the tray away now."

Isabelle hesitated by the door. Then fussily she came across and picked up the tray. "I hope you don't think that you'll be running things around here," she said, in a voice as sharp as a lemon-drop. "Not after your scarlet goings-on. Actors and the like. I've heard all about it, don't you worry."

"I'm not worried," Catriona told her levelly.

"Not even ashamed, I shouldn't wonder," said Isabella.

"Izzy," put in Catriona's mother wanly. "I do wish you wouldn't. Not now."

"Well, I'm sorry, I'm sure, but even at the worst of times some things have to be said, don't they?" Isabella retorted. "She wasn't what you'd call a model daughter, was she? Never did a solitary thing that Stanley wanted. But now he's been taken, she's around the honeypot soon enough, isn't she, the busy little bee?"

Catriona pressed her hands together as if she were praying, and lowered her head. She could never get to grips with Isabella's bitterness: it was like a wriggling sour-tempered hedgehog that hated its life, but refused to be helped. The whole family knew why Isabelle was so bitter, of course; and Isabelle knew they knew. But she couldn't help herself. When she was seventeen, she had been far prettier than Catriona's mother, and she had always had dozens of boyfriends. She had eloped with Tony, a dashing young commercial traveller who had dazzled her into believing that he was going to make a million out of selling Brooke's Monkey Brand soap throughout the northwest of England. But now Tony was a shop-assistant in Liverpool, selling ready-made gents' suits and celluloid collars, and Isabelle was having to make do on 6 pounds seven and nine a week; while Catriona's mother, who had gradually developed during her twenties into a young Victorian woman of ravishing looks, had at last married Stanley Keys, the self-made shipping magnate, after meeting him at a teatime concert in Formby, and was now the mistress of five large houses, seven motorcars, and a fleet of passenger liners that before the War had been the acknowledged to be the most gracious ships afloat. Of course, Catriona's mother had always helped Isabelle out with occasional gifts of money. The Crossley motorcar had been a birthday present. But Isabelle's bitterness had not been softened by her inability to say no. Isabelle had her pride, naturally, but not that much pride.

"I'm just pleased that Catriona is here," her mother told Isabelle in a gentle voice. "This is a time when I'm going to need all of my family around me, without any prejudice or favour shown to anyone. And if you do think of poor Stanley's fortune as a honeypot, well, just remember that Stanley never denied any of his relatives or friends any of the honey. He was a Christian: a man who believed that everybody had a right to a fair share of luxury, if there was any luxury ever to be had."

Isabelle gave a petulant shrug. "I'd better instruct cook about dinner tonight, if Mr Deacon's coming. And I suppose Mr Fearson will want to stay, too."

"I would like it if he were to," said Catriona's mother.

I just hope we have enough cutlets to go around," Isabelle replied, as if someone had already plucked her dinner off the end of her fork.

When she was gone, Catriona took her mother's hand again and stroked it.

"I'm sorry," said Catriona's mother.

"There's no need to be," Catriona told her. "I think I'm used to Aunt Isabelle after all these years."

"It's not her fault, really," said Catriona's mother. "I can understand how she feels. Fate is very unjust sometimes, or at least it appears to be. She doesn't seem to realise that I would gladly give up everything—the house, the shipping line—just for one more day with Stanley. Just for one more minute. We were very happy, you know. Very much in love."

Catriona smiled.

"Are you going to be staying long?" asked her mother. "You don't have to rush back to London straight away?"

"I'll stay for as long as you need me."

"But there's nobody waiting for you, is there? What about that actor boy, Terence?"

"Nigel."

"Oh, yes. Nigel. Won't he be waiting for you?"

Catriona stood up, and walked across to the French windows. It was dark outside now, and she could see her own reflection in the glass, like a ghostly waif standing outside in the garden without even the courage to knock.

"I think I've left Nigel."

"For good?"

"I think so."

Her mother turned around in her chair and looked at her sympathetically. She felt sorry for Catriona, but of course it was also good news. Catriona's waywardness with boys had been the cause of more family dissention than almost anything else, and the Yorkshire relatives in particular had been so scandalised that they had sent Catriona no birthday presents since she was fifteen. The day that her father had discovered that Catriona was playing around in bed with Monsieur Nasillard, her young French tutor, he had furiously sent her off to live with his spinster sister in Morecambe. Every visit of Catriona's to Formby after that had been short, sharp, and attended by hellish arguments. Stanley Keys had loved his daughter too much to disinherit her, or punish her too severely or for too long: but he had come to believe at last that she was a girl with a will and a passion of her own, and when she was eighteen he had given her enough money to go to London, and stay with one of his retired liner captains and his wife, knowing quite well that she would soon find her own friends and lovers, and her own place to live.

He may never have really known how much Catriona had adored him, nor how much she had wanted him simply to say that she could continue to stay at home, and live with the family in a state of truce, even if they couldn't actually live together in accord. It probably wouldn't have worked, anyway. He had probably done the right thing, letting her have her head. But if only he had asked. It would have meant that at least one of her parents understood that she wasn't really the confident, casual, promiscuous girl she appeared to be.

At least one of her parents would have known that she needed more love and encouragement than most children; that her prettiness and her brashness were masks behind which she hid a baffling uncertainty a and an almost addictive need for reassurance. But she realised now that expecting her father to penetrate her personality as deeply as that had been too much. He had been a rich, busy man, and he had been preoccupied with the financing and the building of the world's largest and most luxurious ocean passenger liner, the Arcadia. Apart from loving her, plainly and straightforwardly, what else could he have found the time to do? She thought it was strange that she could not remember what his face had actually looked like. Did people vanish from memory so quickly, when they died? Yesterday he had been alive. He had made telephone calls and eaten a mutton pie. Today, he might just as well never have existed.

"NigeI was a nice chap, wasn't he?" Catriona's mother asked her carefully. "He didn't—well, he didn't treat you roughly, did he?"

Catriona gave her mother a brief, rueful smile. "No, mother. He didn't treat me roughly. He was a bit of a harebrain. Father would have called him a "rumble-seat Roger". But he was very fond of me. He could be marvellous. And when he was on the stage, you wouldn't have believed it was the same man."

"Well, anyway," said Catriona's mother, smoothing her dress. There were tears in her eyes again and Catriona knew that another wave a was coming over her, in spite of the beef tea and the sedatives that Dr Whitby had given her.

"I'll stay, mother, don't worry," Catriona told her softly.

"It's the ship," said her mother. "It's so sad about the ship. The finest ship that ever was, and he never saw it sail."

"I know, mother," whispered Catriona. "But try to be brave. He wouldn't have asked for a better way to be remembered, would he? Whenever anyone mentions the Arcadia, they'll always think of Stanley Keys."

At that moment, Catriona raised her eyes, and there on the small Regency table beside the window was a photograph of her father in a silver frame. The picture must have been taken on a windy day, because his hand was blurred as it went up to catch his cap. But he was smiling, brightly and confidently, a man who was very pleased with himself, and a pleased with life, and quite certain about the future.

THREE

Edgar Deacon arrived late, at a quarter past nine, when they were already at dinner. He came straight into the mahogany-panelled dining-room in his blade clawhammer coat and kissed Catriona's hand. He bowed to Isabelle and said, "Good evening, Percy," to Mr Fearson. Then he took his seat at the far end of the table and meticulously opened out his napkin. Still red-eyed from crying, Lettice the maid ladled out tomato soup for him, although he raised his hand after two helpings to show that he only wanted a little.

"I can't say that it's really been the kind of day that whets one's appetite," he remarked, sprinkling salt over his soup before be had tasted it, and stirring it with his spoon. Too many sad duties to perform, don't you know." He turned to Catriona, and said, "I can't tell you how sorry I am, my dear. The whole business has been a frightful shock. You and your mother have the condolences of the entire company, both board and managerial. Yes, and clerical, too."

"And manual," put in Mr Fearson, breaking a bread roll.

"Well, of course," said Edgar. "Manual, too. Plenty of honest tears have been spilled down at the quayside, and in the warehouse. Your father was an exceptional man, missed by all."

Catriona managed an evanescent smile. She had never quite known what to make of Edgar Deacon, although her father had always seemed to trust him implicitly. "The very Devil when it comes to accounts," her father had always said of him, "and likes to gamble, too, although you wouldn't think it, not to look at him."

Edgar Deacon had been managing director of Keys Shipping for four years now; and for two years before that he had been works manager and chief engineer. Stanley Keys had come across him in India, on one of the first exploratory cruises he had made after the War, when Keys were busily planning for the prosperous and peaceful future. The War to end all wars was over, and Stanley Keys had envisioned a luxury shipping operation that would carry the wealthy and the curious to every country on the map, mundane or exotic, from Antwerp to Surabaja.

They had shared a tonga along English Laundry Road in Calcutta, on their way to the Bengal Club. When Stanley Keys had told Edgar who he was, and why he had come to India, Edgar had nodded in approval. "You're quite right, of course. Luxury travel is about to come into its own. I've been trying to tell that to the directors of Calcutta railway for absolutely years."

He had taken out an Indian ivory cigarette holder, and inserted a Players Perfectos No. 1 into it with the firm twist of an engineer. You should make your shipping line appear to be as elitist as possible. That's the way to reap the greatest rewards. You may carry any a of second- and steerage-class passengers, of course, to pay for your bread and butter, but make the first-class as exclusive as you possibly can. Make it almost impossible for anyone to buy a ticket, and then charge monstrous prices for it. Give your passengers the of being able to tilt their noses up into the air, and say, "I travel Keys, don't y'know."

Stanley Keys had been amused. "And where did you learn that philosophy?" he had asked, as Edgar lit his cigarette.

At the Bengal Club," Edgar had said, between clenched teeth. "I took over the running of the District Engineer's Ball three years ago. It had always been a dismal affair, or so I was told. So I trebled the price of the tickets to twenty rupees, and made it as inconvenient as I could for anyone to get hold of one; and lo and behold it became the most sought-after social event on the calendar."

That evening, on the verandah of the Bengal Club, Stanley had approached Edgar and asked him quite bluntly, "Do you want a job?"

Edgar had been standing with his hands in his pockets watching the sunset, puffing away at his cigarette holder. "You don't know the first thing about me," he had said.

"I know that you run a shipfitting business down at Diamond Harbour, and that you're very well thought of."

"By some," Edgar had said, cryptically. And then, without taking his cigarette holder out of his mouth, "Very well. I accept. I think it's time I went home, anyway."

As Stanley Keys had enlarged and built up his shipping line, he and Edgar had become closer and closer, sharing an office, and taking all of their working lunches together. They were so close, sometimes, that other directors like Percy Fearson had begun uncomfortably to feel that Keys Shipping was a two-man company. But Edgar was ferociously hard worker—punctilious, correct, and tireless, even if he could be a triffle distant with the staff, and that was probably nothing more than a hangover from India. Anyone who still salled the winter months the "cold weather" and referred to the works canteen staff as khitmutgars could hardly be expected to be chummy with anyone on the shop floor.

Edgar had never been seen with a woman; but although Mr. Thurrock insisted that he was "one of those", Mr. Fearson said that he was probably more interested in his work than in petty flirtations. Edgar lived by himself in a severe grey house in the better part of Formby and was not to be drawn on the subject.

He was thin, with black polished hair and drawn-in cheeks; rather like one of the sketches of Sherlock Holmes in The Strand Magazine. He wore half-glasses to read, and his only concession to British life was a rather shorter cigarette-holder than the one he had customarily used in Calcutta.

"I didn't really want to discuss business tonight," he remarked, cracking open his bread roll. "Unfortunately, I think that there is something with which you should be acquainted as soon as possible."

Catriona said, "I really don't know anything about business at all."

"Nonetheless, it is important that you hear what I have to say."

Catriona looked across at Percy Fearson; and Percy Fearson gave her an approving nod. She felt sophisticated enough tonight to talk about business, she supposed; and sad enough, too. Her hair was drawn tightly back from her face and tied with two strings of pearls from her mother's jewellery box. She wore a black silk dress with batwing sleeves, pinned together at the front with a clustered-pearl brooch. Her father would have considered that the gown was cut too low for an occasion as sombre as this, and in a peculiar way Catriona felt upset that she was able to wear it without being admonished.

Edgar said, "Your father was a great man, you know, Miss Keys. He was one of those few fellows who become giants in their own lifetime. When they come to write the history of the greatest ships and how they were built, your father's name will be emblazoned next to those of Ismay, and Cunard, and Ballin."

"Rather we didn't make comparisons with the Hun," put in Percy Fearson, gruffly.

Isabelle, who was struggling with her cutlet, glanced across and gave Edgar a tight little smile to show that she, too, had always believed that Stanley Keys was a hero. She rather cared for Edgar Deacon and pooh-poohed the idea that he might be susceptible to the kind of affections that dare not speak their name. "He's mysterious," she used to say; and one morning she had had a dozing dream that he had taken down her thirteen-shilling cami-knickers and smacked her bare bottom. Tony of course was terrible in bed, even when he wasn't drunk on Newcastle Brown. You could only describe Tony's as a winkle.

"I haven't yet broached this matter with your mother," said Edgar. "I feel that it might be better to leave financial matters until after the funeral."

"She's very shocked, of course," Catriona told him. "But Dr Whitby gave her some sedative tablets, and she's asleep now; although she swore that she'd never be able to."

"Sleep is the best medicine of all," said Edgar. "But how do you feel? You must be tired yourself after travelling all the way up from London."

"I'm numb, actually," said Catriona. "I don't think any of it has quite sunk in yet."

"Well, be careful when it does," Edgar cautioned her. "We're going to be needing you over the next few weeks. After your mother, you are, of course, the sole heiress to Keys Shipping, and your father's death has already entitled you to quite an inheritance of voting stock."

Catriona's eyes widened over the rim of her lifted wineglass. Then carefully she set the glass down on the table again. Although she said nothing, it was quite clear from her expression that she expected Edgar to explain exactly how he would need her and why.

Edgar meticulously took a last spoonful of soup and then sat up very straight. "We had an ad hoc meeting of directors today," he said, steadily. "We talked about a difficulty which has been besetting us for some time, but a difficulty with which we could cope as long as Stanley was still alive. Now, tragically and prematurely, he has passed from amongst us. And the problem is that we have lost not only a dear friend and colleague, and a man whom we respected and loved, but the single most creditworthy asset which Keys Shipping ever owned."

"Surely you're not trying to suggest that the company can't continue without Stanley?

"The problem is almost as serious as that," Edgar nodded. "The whole point, in plain English, without any Hobson-Jobson, is that Keys Shipping should never have attempted to build the Arcadia at all."

"What on earth does that mean?" asked Catriona. "Why not? She's a beautiful ship."

"Beautiful, yes," said Edgar. "But paid for, no."

"You mean the company's in debt?"

"Not just the company, my dear. Your whole family fortune, too. The Keys Shipping Line is so financially overstretched that we could be declared bankrupt at any moment. Your father, you see, gave personal guarantees for all of the company's debts. While he was alive, the banks considered these to be quite acceptable. But, now that he's gone..."

Catriona frowned quickly at Percy Fearson, but all Percy could do was nod and say, "It's true, I'm afraid."

"But we own so many ships," Catriona protested. "How could we possibly be bankrupt? And the Arcadia is the most luxurious passenger liner in the world. I don't understand."

Edgar remained silent while Lettice came in to take his soup bowl away and serve him with his lamb cutlet. Then, when she had gone, he said in that precise voice of his, "Keys Shipping is paying the same penalty that White Star is paying -namely, the penalty of having been one of the first shipping companies to build a grand ocean cruising fleet. Before the War, of course, Keys was one of the most vigorous fleets on the Atlantic. But our ships are growing older now, and less fashionable, and as you know for yourself, the oceangoing public is notoriously fickle about which ships are pukkah and which aren't. That was the principal reason your father wanted to lay down the Arcadia—to own a liner that could challenge the Aquitania and the Berengaria and the Majestic. "A gleaming ferryboat for the rich and titled", that's what he called her; a ship that would be glamorous and fabled in her own right and would also lend lustre to the rest of the fleet. But, she has cost us nearly four million pounds to build and to fit out, and this expense has come at a time when we have been losing money steadily on the greater part of the rest of our fleet. We have been systematically refitting the older ships, of course. You wait until you see the magnificent job that John Brown's have done on the Iliad. But refitting has been vastly expensive, too; and we've run out of credit, as simple as that. The bank won't underwrite us for any more for another six months, and the Government have told us quite bluntly that they won't lend us any money unless we consider a merger with Cunard."

"I was not aware of any of this," said Catriona.

"Well, you wouldn't have been, would you, living away from your family?" put in Isabelle sharply. She didn't quite have the vinegar to say "in sin" but the intimation was there.

Edgar cut the meat from his cutlet and began to chew. "We used to have a lamb cutlet every Thursday night at Peliti's Restaurant in Calcutta, don't y'know, myself and all the other chaps from my chummery. Lamb cutlet and mint sauce, every Thursday. Always think it's Thursday when I eat lamb; can't shake it off."

Catriona said, "What are we going to do?"

"Do?"

About the debts? How are we going to pay them off?"

"Well, we have a choice," said Edgar. He helped himself to a small sip of wine. "We can hope that the Arcadia puts up such a stunning performance on her maiden voyage that the banks can be persuaded to change their minds, although I have to be truthful and say that the chances of that happening are pretty remote. We'd have to take the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing first go; and apart from that we'd have to show firm bookings that were up by at least twenty per cent, if not more. That can happen, of course. After the Kronprinzessin Cecilie took the Blue Riband, sales of North German Lloyd tickets went up twenty-six per cent. But it takes so long for ticket sales to be realised as profit that the banks may not wish to cooperate."

"What else can we do?" asked Isabelle. "Are there any alternatives?"

"Oh, yes. Several. We could dismantle the Keys fleet and sell it off piecemeal; but that, of course, would mean that we would sacrifice the job of every men who works for us, two thousand seven hundred men in all, not counting casual labour. We would ruin this entire community overnight, no doubt at all, and after everything that Stanley has done for it, I hardly think that we should consider any step as drastic as that."

"I'm against it, for one," said Percy Fearson.

"Then... we have had some preliminary approaches from International Mercantile Marine, in America. Their foreign business manager, George Welterman, has been in London for the past three weeks, and will be sailing back to New York on the maiden voyage. He was talking to your father on the telephone last week about buying up the Keys fleet. Of course, your father refused; but this afternoon George Welterman called again, and suggested that we might care to reconsider his offer."

"Which is?" asked Catriona.

"Better than most, as far as I can see," said Edgar. "Eighteen million in gold for the entire Keys Shipping line; and a guarantee that it will be kept intact, and that all existing employment agreements will be honoured for three years."

"But that means we'll lose the shipping line entirely," said Catriona.

Edgar chewed, and nodded. "It will pass under the control of International Mercantile Marine lock, stock, and barrel. Or rather, it will pass under the control of a British board of directors who are directly answerable to IMM, since no British ship can be sold to a foreigner."

Catriona said, "Eighteen million in gold—how far will that stretch?"

"It will pay off our debts, and the interest on our debts, and it will probably leave us with slightly less than a million pounds. Enough to invest in something afresh, if you have a mind to."

"But the end of the Keys fleet as a Keys family business?"

"Unless Mr. Welterman decides to appoint you or your mother as chairman," said Edgar. The tone of his voice was quite flat, but Catriona was alert enough to recognise the sarcasm in what he was saying. All that was left of the Keys family after her father's death was her mother, dithery and self-indulgent; Isabella and Tony, neither of whom had the very first due about business; and herself, a twenty-one-year-old flapper with no experience and a naughty reputation.

"You mentioned several alternatives," said Catriona, as coldly as she could. "What were the others?"

Lettice, freshly red-eyed, came in to collect up the plates. She did it very noisily and managed to drop a lot of knives and forks, and then pick them up again, and then drop them again in the doorway. "There's only cheese," she said, miserably.

Catriona said, "Don't worry, Lettice. We'll help ourselves. Aunt Isabelle, would you mind awfully getting the water biscuits from the sideboard?"

Isabelle, bustling a little, fetched the crackers. Percy Fearson poured the port. They spooned ripe blue-veined Stilton on to their plates and ate it with olives and fresh celery.

Edgar Deacon said, "We could go into voluntary liquidation. That's always a possibility."

"Not one that I'd consider," said Percy Fearson.

"Well, it may be forced on us," replied Edgar. He brushed crumbs from the side of his mouth with a prissy gesture of his napkin. "It may also be one way of surviving. We could buy back the ships we wanted from the receiver, and start up again under a different flag."

"I won't hear of it," said Percy Fearson. "It took Stanley years to build up the reputation of Keys Shipping as honest, and upright, and that kind of financial jiggery-pokery just won't do."

"I was asked for alternatives," said Edgar.

"Honorable alternatives, yes," Percy Fearson retorted.

"Well, there's only one other," said Edgar. "And that is to sell the Arcadia separately."

"Would anyone be interested?" asked Isabelle.

"Stanley was visited several times by representatives of American TransAtlantic asking if he might consider selling or lending the Arcadia. But they were never offering enough money. Three million was about their best for an outright sale; and in any case, Stanley was determined not to sell, at any price. The Arcadia was Stanley's dream. He thought she would transform the entire shipping line overnight. It's true, of course, she has. She's almost broken us."

"In any case, selling the Arcadia separately wouldn't do much to solve our problems," said Percy Fearson. "We'd be left with the rest of the fleet and scarcely enough profit to pay mooring fees. And we'd have lost our most glamorous asset, present company excepted."

Catriona gave Percy a fleeting smile. She liked him when he pretended to be flirtatious. "Who runs American TransAtlantic?" she asked. "Isn't it Mark Beeney?"

"That's right. Thirty-one years old, almost implausibly handsome, and a dollar millionaire twenty times over. Well, on paper, anyway."

"I think I read about him in the Evening Standard a couple of days ago," said Catriona. "They said he was the most eligible man in the world. And he's in London, too."

"He'll be coming on the Arcadia's maiden voyage," said Percy.

"Really? I know that Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford are going to be on her."

Edgar Deacon lifted his hand, and ticked off his fingers one by one. "Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Princess Xenia of Russia, Jack Dempsey, Dame Clara Butt'—he raised his other hand and carried on counting—"Madge Bellamy, Leonore Ulrich, Charles Schwab of Bethlehem Steel, and even Senora Zelmira Paz de Gainza, with her ten maids, four motorcars, and a chambermaid."

Isabelle remarked, "It sounds like the Ark."

"Well, we do have some animals, too," said Edgar. "A 2,000-pound chow dog called Choonam Brilliantine, whom we have to feed with fresh raw eggs for his lunch every day; and Pyramid, the horse which won last year's Derby. He's going to be shipped in a special padded stable, and he's going to be taking his own blacksmith with him."

Catriona held her glass towards Percy Fearson for a little more port. Percy Fearson hesitated at first, but Edgar Deacon nodded at him to fill her glass up. "After what Mr. Thurrock told me about your young man's cocktails I'm sure a little 1911 port won't go to your head," he smiled. His smile was as thin as celluloid.

Catriona said, "This still doesn't solve the problem of how we're going to save Keys Shipping."

"We have some time left to consider the matter, of course," said Edgar. "But by the time the Arcadia docks in New York, we will have had to have made up our minds. The sheer cost of refuelling her and victualling her up for the return journey will be beyond us, unless we can be sure of a sale, or some further credit. And I would very much dislike to have her impounded in a foreign port."

"Why send her to New York at all, if we can't afford it?" asked Isabelle.

"We can't afford not to send her either," Edgar explained. "We have scores of cargo contracts to fulfil, contracts which have already been paid for; we've bought food, and drink, and fuel. How are we going to settle with all of our creditors if we don't sail, and have to refund our passenger's ticket money? Not to sail would sink us faster than sailing will. And besides, if we fail to take the Arcadia out, if we fail to show her as a fast and exciting and fashionable ship, her value on the shipping market will be seriously—disastrously—undermined."

Catriona said, "You really believe that we'll have to sell Keys Shipping?"

Edgar set down his butter knife. "I wish I could say no, but I cannot."

"And you think that George Welterman is the man to sell it to?"

"He will, after all, keep the existing company intact."

"What did father think of him?"

"Your father disliked him; but then George Welterman is not a particularly easy man to like. Nonetheless, he is probably the most powerful single man in American shipping today, apart from his masters at IMM."

How can we think of selling Keys to a man whom father disliked?"

Edgar said, "I regret, Miss Keys, that we often have to deal with people we dislike, as a matter of expediency."

"There must be another way of raising money somehow," said Catriona. "To think of selling everything that Father worked for all these years, and right at the moment of his greatest success..."

"You have to think of more than your immediate family," Edgar told her. "The families of scores of Liverpool men depend on us, too. The most important thing is to pay off what we owe and keep the company in one piece. That may not be everything that your wanted; but it will leave him with a very fitting memorial."

"Well, I just hope that I don't have to meet this George Welterman," said Catriona.

"Oh, I'm afraid that you will," said Edgar. "You're coming along on the maiden voyage, after all; and Mr. Welterman will be joining us."

"I'm coming?" asked Catriona.

"Of course. Who else is there to represent the Keys family? Your mother can't come, she's just not up to it, and somebody has to be sweet to the bankers and the food suppliers."

"Your father always talked about cajoling you into coming along," Percy Fearson smiled. "He wanted to attract the younger travellers, you see, the bright young things, so that if they got the idea it was smart to travel Keys, he'd have loyal new passengers who would travel with Keys for ever after."

"But I don't see where I come into it," said Catriona.

"He was going to publicise you as the Queen of the Atlantic," said Percy. "He was going to have you dressed by Paris designers, and buy you jewellery and furs and you name it. There's a whole file on it down at the office."

"He never told me," said Catriona. "The last time we met, we had that awful row, and he never told me."

"I think he was almost afraid you wouldn't agree to do it," said Percy.

"Afraid?" frowned Catriona. She couldn't imagine her father ever having been afraid.

"He wanted you to be the star of the whole voyage," Percy told her gently. "He loved you, you know; and I sometimes think that when he built the Arcadia he built it for you."

Isabelle stared at Catriona with an expression of such jealousy that she could have made a herring curl up. Catriona felt giddy, and the table seemed to tilt away from her. She was used to Nigel's poisonous Chicago cocktails, but not to Chateau Mouton Rothschild from her father's cellars. But perhaps it wasn't the wine at all. Perhaps it was the way in which her life had so suddenly tricked her. She had thought she was free of her father, and relieved of all involvement in the Keys family. A carefree, heel-kicking flapper. But now she had discovered that freedom is something which is granted—by a government to its people; by a parent to his child—and when death supervenes, the grant of freedom is automatically withdrawn, and has to be renewed.

"Mr. Deacon," she said, "I really don't know what to say. You'll nave to give me time to think about it."

"There isn't much time, my dear," said Mr. Fearson. "The Arcadia has to sail on Tuesday, whatever."

"You can't even delay her until father's buried?"

Edgar shook his head. "The cost of even one day's delay would be more than we could stand. And apart from that, the Arcadia must start off her active life with a reputation for reliability."

Catriona sat where she was, and then discovered that tears were sliding down her cheeks.

"Forgive me, Miss Keys," said Edgar. "I didn't intend to upset you today of all days."

"No, no. It's not your fault," said Catriona. "I'm just tired, that's all."

"Dottie has your room ready for you, if you wish to withdraw."

Percy Fearson escorted Catriona out of the dining-room; and in the dark timbered hallway he gave her over to Dottie, the upstairs maid, a ruddy-faced young girl who had come into service with the Keys family when she was fourteen. Dottie took Catriona's arm and led her a upstairs to the green-wallpapered guest bedroom at the end of the landing. Catriona's old bedroom was being redecorated, and there was a sharp smell of lead paint and wallpaper-paste around.

"The night was so warm that the diamond-leaded window which gave out on to the main sweep of the garden had been left wide open, and the full moon could be seen rising from behind the poplars. Moths pattered and battered against the green-and-white frosted bedside lamp. "I'll squirt them with Flit if you want," Dottie suggested.

Catriona stood with her arms by her sides, her eyes closed, while Dottie unhooked her black dress for her, and lifted it over her head. She wore no slip or corset; she thought her figure looked more boyish if she went without. Dottie helped her to roll down her black silk stockings and step out of her crepe-de-chine panties.

Catriona said to her, "What was the last thing my father ever said to you, Dottie? Can you remember?"

Dottie had to think about that. She was holding up Catriona's biscuit-on-cream pleated voile nightgown, and she was obviously astonished by the shortness and the airiness of it. "I don't know, miss," she said, "I think I'm still perplexed by it all."

"You can't remember anything?"

Dottie frowned. "Now, then. I remember I saw him in the hallway just before he went upstairs to bed. He said, "You won't forget to remind Cook that I want my Food of Life, will you, Dottie?" That's what he said."

Catriona sat down on the edge of the bed, and started to unpin her hair. "Food of Life," she whispered sadly, and she thought of the little nursery rhyme her father used to sing her, the one which he had invented himself.

Where the fish swim free, child,

And never bite the line;

Keep your nose in your own soup

And keep it out of mine."

FOUR

Mark Beeney said, "I've always been an Anglophile. I love your climate, I love your women, I love your mutton pies. But God Almighty, I've never understood your cricket."

Philip Carter-Helm lifted his boater off his neatly-trimmed hair and wiped around the leather sweatband with his handkerchief. "You can't really understand cricket until you understand loafing," he said. "You must never listen to any explanations of the rules of cricket, byes or fours or lows; or any tommy-rot like that. It's the mental attitude that counts. The British love to loaf; but unlike Americans, they have to find an excuse for it. Hence, cricket."

Mark and Philip were strolling in Hyde Park, late in the afternoon, within sight of the Albert Memorial. Some small boys were playing cricket under the trees; their single stump casting a long sundial shadow across the marmalade-coloured grass. Their cries as they played were like the cries of small birds. There was a smell of soil-mown grass in the air, and London evenings.

Mark said, "You're a little cynical, aren't you?"

"Ah," said Philip, "but all Englishmen are. Our cynicism protects us from our sentimentality."

 Mark stooped to pick up a long whippy branch. As he walked, he swished it in the air. "You want to talk about the Arcadia?" he asked.

Philip Carter-Helm was tall, and well built, with the kind of open-faced good looks that characterised Old Boys from minor public schools, especially those whose photographs appeared in the school magazine after they had been killed at Omdurman or Killa Khazi. He had chestnut hair, and very clear grey eyes, and a bump on the bridge of his nose from boxing. He spoke hi that clipped newsreel accent that made Americans believe that every Briton must be a relative of the King; but English ears could pick up the slightest of Northern intonations. He said, "path', with a short "a', instead of the drawled-out aristocratic "parth'.

Mark had been disinclined to talk to Philip at first, since he was on a furious-tour of all his European interests, and London was his last and busiest stop before sailing back to the States. In two months Mark had visited Zurich, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Frederikshaven, Naples, Capri, and Marseilles. In all, he had visited seventeen cities and nine countries, and now he was anxious to get back to Boston; a to assess the state of his business interests from a detached distance, but to see Juliet again, the girl he had met only days before he had sailed for Europe. She was the only daughter of the Harrises; the Newport Harrises; and she was not only dark-eyed and curiously beautiful, she was awash with inherited dollars. Mark had an unashamed liking both for looks and money. After all, he had both attributes himself.

The popular magazines called him "boyishly handsome'. He had irrepressibly curly hair, and the firm square jawline of a Boston Irishman. He wore his grey tweed suit with casual but assertive style, and his collars and cuffs were almost unnaturally white. He walked straight-backed, like the horse-rider and yachtsman he was.

Philip Carter-Helm had left him a letter that morning at his hotel.

It had said simply, "I know you covet the Arcadia. Perhaps I can assist." The message had been cryptic enough and arrogant enough for Mark to cancel an afternoon meeting with his underwriters at Lloyd's and take a walk with Philip in the park.

"There isn't any question that the Arcadia is the most advanced I luxurious passenger ship ever built," said Philip. "She's years ahead of anything currently afloat; and it's going to take Cunard and White Star another five years even to catch up with her. There's no doubt in my mind, either, that the future lies with giant-sized liners. Look how fast passenger ships have developed in the past fifty years. In 1874, the biggest Cunard steamers were the Bothnia and the Scythia, 420 feet long, with a gross tonnage that was less than 5,000 tons. Now look what they've built—a 960-footer like the Arcadia, 53,000 tons."

"You have it all at your fingertips," Mark said dryly.

"Well, it's my job. But, when I look at your fleet, American TransAtlantic, I can see that you sorely need a fast prestige express a to give you not only glamour and style, but carrying-capacity, too."

"I can't disagree with you," said Mark. "I've been saying the same thing to my board of directors for the past three years. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much likelihood of my being able to buy the Arcadia on her own, as a one-off purchase. I know Stanley Keys is having his money troubles, but he's resisted all of my offers so far; and I don't see much hope of him changing his mind."

"That may be possible," said Philip. Mark glanced across at him quickly, alerted by a noticeable sense of what?—sadness, regret?—in Philip's voice.

"You wouldn't like to tell me how?

"Well... let me put it theoretically. Supposing Stanley Keys were to give up his share of Keys Shipping?"

"Give it up? I can't see him doing that. What would he want to give it up for? Stanley Keys is Keys Shipping. Besides, he's as stubborn as a pickaxe handle." Mark paused, and then he said, "Do you know something that I don't know?"

They had reached the Serpentine now; drowned cumulus clouds lay beneath the ruffled blue surface; and toy boats spanked across the water at a sharp diagonal. Philip thrust his hands into the pockets of his summer flannels, and said, "I'm in the business, that's all. Shipping, maritime insurance, that kind of thing."

"All right, then," said Mark cautiously. "Supposing Stanley Keys did give up his share of Keys Shipping?"

"Well, then, you'd find that you had an interesting situation as far as the distribution of voting stock was concerned. You see, Stanley Keys has always kept a controlling interest in Keys Shipping, with fifty-one per cent of the stock. The other stock-owners are International Mercantile Marine, with twelve per cent; Thistle Maritime in Glasgow, with five per cent; the Eire Credit Bank, with five per cent; Mr. Deacon and Mr. Fearson, who are both directors of Keys, with two per cent apiece; Mr. Thurrock with one per cent; Mrs. Keys" sister Isabella, with two per cent; Mr. Rogers and Mr. Peabody, half a per cent each; and then a collection of trusts and individuals and insurance companies who hold the balance of nineteen per cent."

"Yes?" asked Mark. "What of it? I can find out all of this down at Lloyd's."

"Of course. But what you can't find out at Lloyd's is that Stanley Keys has willed his fifty-one per cent share of the company to his wife Doris and his daughter Catriona. Doris gets twenty-six per cent, Catriona gets twenty-five per cent."

"That isn't unusual. My father willed my mother and me just about the same percentage of American Trans Atlantic."

"I am not saying it's unusual. I'm just saying that, once the bequest is made, there will be a fascinating line-up of opposing interests. Considering the financial trouble that Keys is now going through, I suspect that Mr Deacon, the managing director, will try to put forward a proposal that Keys should be sold to IMM, who have been after Keys for ages. Of course, IMM will back that proposal, with their twelve per cent of the vote, and there's no doubt that Eire Credit Bank will, too. They've never been deliriously happy about lending Keys so much money. The rest of the Keys board will go along with Mr. Deacon, and Mrs. Keys will undoubtedly go along with the board."

It had already dawned on Mark that what Philip was telling him was not theoretical at all. He stopped where he was, the evening wind blowing his uncovered curls, and he held the cuff of Philip's coat, as if it were necessary to cling to him in order to make sure that he stayed here by the Serpentine and told him everything,

A snotty-nosed boy came up and said, "Gissa penny, mister," but Mark waved him away.

"Shitface," the boy said gratuitously.

 Phillip said, "On the other hand, you have Thistle Maritime, who handle a good proportion of Keys" cargoes, and they would certainly vote against a sale to IMM, since IMM always use their own forwarding agencies. And most of the various small trusts and insurance companies who hold nineteen per cent of the stock would oppose a sale to IMM because it would take effective control of the company out of England."

"The unknown quantity in this line-up is Stanley Keys" daughter Catriona," said Philip. "With a twenty-five per cent holding, she would obviously hold the balance of power between those who favoured a sale to IMM, and those who wanted Keys either to remain completely independent or at worst to sell off some of the company's assets in order to keep the greater pan of the fleet in Keys family hands. Assets like the Arcadia, for instance."

Mark released Philip's sleeve, but didn't take his eyes off him. "What you're telling me is that Stanley Keys is dead," he said hoarsely.

Philip said, "Yes."

"When did this happen? I haven't heard anything about it."

"Last night, very late. It'll probably be out in this evening's papers."

Mark said, "How did you get to bear about it?"

"It's my business. You won't get anywhere in shipping unless you keep your ear to the ground."

"So Stanley Keys is dead," said Mark, reflectively. "He couldn't have been all that old. Fifty?"

"Fifty-three. I understand he had a heart attack."

"Well, the way he used to work, I'm not surprised. And he never even got to see the Arcadia sail. That's a little sad, isn't it? Boy, that's sad."

Philip nodded. "Yes. Very sad."

"And that's what's going to happen?" Mark wanted to know. "His fifty-one per cent share in the company gets split up between his wife and his daughter?"

"That's right."

"So what's your interest in it?"

They started to walk back towards Park Lane. Reels of black upright taxi-cabs drove backwards and forwards through the park, and the late sun lit up the pale grimy columns of Marble Arch. Philip said, "I represent a number of the small stockholders, as a matter of fact, including Thistle. Their interest is in seeing Keys remain independent. My interest, obviously, is in my fee if I succeed in ensuring that this happens."

"So how do you intend to do that?"

"Plainly the first step is to persuade Miss Catriona Keys that selling to IMM is not necessarily the wisest course of action."

"She's coming along on the maiden voyage, isn't she?"

"That's right. She's a very attractive young girl, I'm sure you'll get on famously. A little wayward, her father always used to say, but I think he respected her for it, too."

"You sound as if you knew Stanley Keys pretty well."

Philip shrugged. "On and off. He wasn't a particularly easy man to get close to."

They passed Apsley House, the former residence of the Duke of Wellington, and parted company at Hyde Park Corner. As they shook hands, Mark said, "I'll keep in touch. You can expect a call from my company secretary tomorrow morning."

"Oh, well, don't worry about that. I'm coming along on the Arcadia, too."

"Sounds as if it's going to be a regular party."

"I am sure it is," said Philip. "Well, cheer-no."

"Cheer-ho," replied Mark self-consciously.

As he began to walk back to his hotel, however, he began to feel that in spite of all the British bonhomie of their encounter, Philip had only allowed him to be privy to part of the story. He frowned as he walked, trying to work out what it was that hadn't quite fitted together.

A newsboy yelped out, "Pape-ear, pape-ear, famous shipping magnate dead, pape-ear!"

He dug into his pocket for a penny, and bought the Evening Standard.

FIVE

He was staying at Brown's, on the Albemarle Street side, in a suite of rooms which cost seven pounds the night. As he entered the lobby, the porter called, "Messages, Mr. Beeney!" and hurried across with a sheaf of envelopes.

Mark sorted through the messages quickly, then tipped the porter half a-crown, although a florin would have been enough. The porter said, "Obliged, Mr. Beeney, sir," and retreated to his cubbyhole. Mark walked along the corridor to his suite, tearing open the messages one by one, feeling unusually despondent. Or perhaps it wasn't despondency at all; perhaps it was just that unsettling sensation that the world of shipping had somehow changed, and changed forever, now that one of its pivotal personalities had so suddenly disappeared.

"Mr. Beeney, sir, glad to have you with us," said the assistant manager, gliding past him on the left-hand side like a ballroom dancer.

Mark opened the door of his suite and stepped inside, kicking the door closed behind him with his foot.

"Damn it," he said aloud. Philip Carter-Helm had really aroused his curiosity, and he hated curiosity, especially his own.

Something tumultuous must be happening at Keys: not only within the Keys boardroom but within the Keys family itself. Carter-Helm had given him one version of it, but there had to be others. Was it true that Stanley Keys had left a quarter of his voting stock to his twenty-one-year-old daughter? Was it true that most of the small shareholders and insurance companies wanted Keys to remain independent? It was crucial to Mark if they did, because he coveted the Arcadia more than any other vessel in the world. She was the ship he would have built as his own flagship, if the board of American TransAtlantic hadn't so consistently counselled him to hold back. They agreed in principle with the idea of building or acquiring a new express flagship; but did it really have to be a gilded barge, like the Arcadia? The future of travel lay not with the first-class passenger, whose tastes and expectations required prodigious numbers of trained staff and extraordinary feats of catering; but with the second-and third-class passenger, who required only a bed, a chair, a little deck space, and plain good cooking. One director had even suggested that transcontinental aeroplanes could soon take over from the giant liners, and that in ten years" time the grand shipping companies would all be out of business.

That, of course, was somewhat far-fetched. As another American TransAtlantic director had retorted, "Your first-class passenger wouldn't contemplate crossing the Atlantic without his full quota of luggage and at least some rudimentary entertainment en route. By the time you've loaded an aeroplane with a hundred pieces of Swaine, Adeney and Brigg luggage and a Steinway grand piano, where's the room even for one passenger, leave alone hundreds?"

Mark had been torn. He recognised that tourist-class fares were going to bring American TransAtlantic the steady profits of the next decade; and he was modern-minded enough to accept that air travel might one day cream off some of the business trade. After all, there were many passengers who would be prepared to sacrifice luxury for speed. But he still believed that American TransAtlantic needed a glittering flagship; a ship which would carry the company name into high social currency all over the world, and which would lure passengers to travel American TransAtlantic in the same way that the Mauretania's glamour attracted passengers to travel Cunard.

He stripped off his tweed coat, and tossed it onto a chair. Just then his manservant Wallis appeared, buttoning up his vest. "Mr. Crombey has been waiting for you for some time, sir," he said, collecting up Mark's coat, and folding it neatly over his arm. "He's back in his room now, sir, and asks if you could be kind enough to call him when you come in."

Wallis was a grey-haired Louisiana negro whom Mark's father had met on board the Mississippi steamer Alonzo Child in the 1880s. He had been a deckhand then, but Joe Beeney had taught him the rudiments of social grace, and Chloe Beeney had eventually turned him into one of the best black butlers in Boston.

Mark's father often used to say that when he met Mark's mother, "the whole damned Western hemisphere trembled'. There was no doubt that Mark was the product of one of the most passionate collisions of wilful and headstrong people that the nineteenth century had ever witnessed; and his father often used to compare his meeting with Mark's mother with the poem that Thomas Hardy had written to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic by an iceberg.

Alien they seemed to be

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history.

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event.

Mark's mother, Chloe McKeown Amery, had been the daughter of one of Boston's noblest and wealthiest families. When Chloe's father had earnestly complained at a public luncheon that he was taxed ninety-two per cent, one wag in the audience had shouted out a he would certainly like to try to live on the remaining eight per cent. The Amery's money was in property, in railroad stocks, in mercantile insurance, and shipping; and it was through the shipping side of their business that Chloe had accidentally come to meet Joshua Marblehead Beeney, the captain of one of the Amery's largest vessels, Seraphic. Chloe had always been an obstinate girl, and when she had been dispatched to Switzerland at the age of eiteen to "finish', her mother had entrusted her into Captain Beeney's personal custody; little realising that this blunt, rugged, oddly becoming man would promptly and insatiably fall in love with Chloe, and that she would just as promptly and with equal ferocity fall in love with him. When he had found out about their affair, Chloe's father had thrown a fit of rage close to the epileptic, but Chloe had been as persistent as ever, and in the same way that she had persuaded her father to buy her a rocking horse when she was four, she had persuaded him to let her marry Joe Beeney. Part of her dowry had been a sizeable interest in Amery shipping; and after the death of Chloe's father in 1893, Joe Beeney had taken over the entire company. Tragically, he had died himself only four years later, drowned while sailing his yacht off Point Gammon, Massachusetts. And so, at the age of twenty-three, Mark Beeney had inherited a shipping line that was second only to United States Lines, and an incalculable fortune in property, stocks, paintings, racehorses, and land. It was hardly surprising that he was considered to be one of the world's most eligible young men.

Mark shook open the Evening Standard that he had bought, and said, "Get me a drink before you call Mr Crombey, will you? Did you know that Stanley Keys is dead?"

""No, sir. Mr Stanley Keys of Keys Shipping, sir?"

"The very same. Look, here it is in the paper."

The story was on the front page, under advertisements for Dr. J. Collis Brown's Chlorodyne and a Thursday night "Souper Dansant" at the Metropole. Stanley Keys, chairman, founder, and principal stockholder of Keys Shipping Line, had died the previous night of a massive heart seizure. So far the company had not announced a successor, but the directors were adamant that Mr. Keys would have wished the new luxury liner Arcadia to leave Liverpool on Tuesday, as scheduled, for her maiden voyage.

"Mr Keys" only child, his twenty-one-year-old daughter Miss Catriona Keys, is understood to have returned to the family home from London, where she has become well-known in recent months in theatrical circles. She recently denied suggestions that she was engaged to marry musical actor Mr Nigel Myers, who is currently appearing in Daydreams of 1924 at the Prince Edward."

Mark turned the City pages, but apart from a note that "Keys Shipping shares drop 1¹/₂ pence" there was nothing about the company's future plans, or how dangerously in debt they were. Wallis brought him a bourbon and seltzer, and he sipped it thoughtfully.

The last time he had met Stanley Keys, in the bar of Scott's restaurant in Piccadilly, he had openly expressed his admiration of Arcadia, and said, "If ever you need liquidity, Mr. Keys, I'll buy her from you for cash."

Stanley Keys had given Mark that quizzical, amused look which either charmed or infuriated the people he met, and replied, "I'll never be that hard up, my lad. The Arcadia's more than just a ship; she's my own flesh and blood. Aye, and my spirit, too. You don't go selling your spirit."

Nonetheless, it was common knowledge in the shipping business that Keys had desperately overstretched their resources by building such a lavish flagship; and it had always been Mark's intuition that Stanley Keys would sacrifice her at the very last if it meant that he could keep the rest of his fleet alive. Stanley Keys had always been a fleet man, rather than a devotee to one particular ship. He had been just as happy crossing the Atlantic in one of his small single-class steamers as he had been in the best of his luxury liners. Given the right historical circumstances, and a better social background, Stanley Keys would have made a fine Naval commander.

But now he was abruptly gone, and it was almost impossible for Mark to guess what the board of Keys would do to remain solvent. It was quite possible that they would auction off the entire fleet, and they would probably come under heavy pressure from George Welterman to make a bargain offer to IMM.

One thing was certain: they would have to let the Arcadia sail on Tuesday. They would have far too much capital and prestige invested in the maiden voyage to cancel or postpone it now. But what then? If Mark knew anything about Keys" finances, they would scarcely able to afford to bring her back to Liverpool again. He said to Wallis, "Bring me the telephone, will you? I think I'd better make few calls."

"You're dining in tonight, sir?"

'"Maybe. I'll see how hungry I feel. I was toying with the idea of going to Rule's for a pork chop."

Wallis brought him the white candlestick telephone, and he asked the hotel operator to connect him with Mr. Edgar Deacon, of Formby, in Lancashire. Then he said to Wallis, "Call Mr. Crombey, will you? And tell him to bring in all the Italian figures, and all the reports on De Freitas."

"Yes, sir. But I have to say that Mr. Crombey's not in a happy mood tonight, sir."

"I don't care what kind of a mood he's in. Will you call him?"

"Yes, sir."

"Operator?" said Mark. "Ah, good. Do you have the number? Formby what? Two-oh-fife-fower? Hey, don't you feel a bally ass having to pronounce numbers like that? Oh, well, I didn't mean it. I'm sorry. Yes, I'll make a note of it. All right. Now, could you please connect me?"

There was a knock at the sitting-room door. Mark waved Wallis to go and answer it, and the butler tugged at his lapels, opened the door, and inquired, "Who is it, please?1

At the same time, Edgar Deacon came on the line. He was just about to have dinner with Catriona, and he sounded vaguely exasperated. "Who is it?" he asked, his voice tinny and distant.

"It's Mark Beeney," shouted Mark. "Can you hear me?" He felt as if he were trying to shout to someone on the opposite rim of the Grand Canyon. "I was talking to Mr Keys not long ago about buying the Arcadia."

"Yes, Mr Beeney. Quite so. What can I do for you?

"I read the papers tonight. I'm sorry to hear about Stanley. It was a great shock."

"Well, thank you for your condolences," said Edgar, "but is that all you rang for? I'm really very busy. I expect you can imagine that it's been a frightfully gruelling day."

"I'm sure of it, and I'm sorry," Mark told him. "But listen, that isn't all. What I wanted to do was repeat my offer. I'd very much like to buy the Arcadia as the flagship of American TransAtlantic. I'm prepared to pay four pounds million cash, subject to survey, and I'm prepared to settle the deal right away, even before she's cut her teeth."

There was a silence, punctuated only by the crackling of long-distance telephone lines. Then Edgar Deacon said, with all the correctness of an experienced office wallah, "You realise, Mr Beeney, that you cannot actually buy the Arcadia. A ship in British law is a small piece of the Kingdom, whether it is at sea or at anchor. No alien can actually own a British ship or any share of it, and even if he were to acquire one by accident or good fortune, he would immediately forfeit it to the Crown, although he would undoubtedly be compensated for his loss. A foreigner may not even serve as an officer on a British vessel."

Mr. Deacon, I know all of that, and it entrances me," said Mark. But I don't intend to buy the Arcadia as an individual. I simply want control of the Arcadia transferred to Amery, London, so that my British board of directors will control the Arcadia for me at two removes. All legal, and correct, but the money's just as good."

There was a long silence. Mark said, "Hello? You still there?"

"Yes, I'm still here, Mr Beeney," said Edgar Deacon. "But I must say that I'm really not used to doing business over the telephone. You are coming along on the voyage, aren't you? Perhaps we can discuss the matter then, in a more civilised manner, over a chota peg."

"A what?"

"Two fingers to you, old chap."

"I beg your pardon?" asked Mark, perplexed, but still trying to sound British.

"Two fingers of gin, or whatever it is you drink. Burra peg is three fingers. But listen, we'll have plenty of time to talk about this later. Poor Stanley is still warm in his coffin. It's hardly appropriate to discuss this now. The Arcadia was like a daughter to him, closer in some ways than his own daughter was. And I have yet to discuss this matter in any detail with my board of directors."

"You won't get a better offer, nor such a fast one," said Mark.

"It's very generous," Edgar acknowledged. "And please don't think that I'm turning you down out of hand."

"Well, of course you can have some tune to think about it," said Mark. "But I don't want to have to wait indefinitely. Four million is a great deal of money to lay my hands on in cash; and there'll be some financial planning to do."

"I understood completely," said Edgar. "But, if you could excuse me—"

"Sure," said Mark. "I'm sorry I called you on a question of business on a day like today."

"Stanley wouldn't have minded," Edgar replied. "Stanley would have recognized that respect for the dead has to wait for the needs of the living."

Mark was a little baffled by that remark. He said, "Sure, okay," and hung up the earpiece.

"I don't think I can ever quite get the hang of dealing with the British," he remarked, turning around to Wallis. But it was then that he saw who it was that Wallis had let into the room, and his frown faded immediately, and he spread his arms in welcome, and said, "Marcia, I thought you were in Paris."

Marcia Conroy came flowing towards him across the sitting-room, the sleeves of her silvery dress rippling in the breeze of her own coming, tall and blonde, with shingled hair and pearl ear-rings that danced and swung (in Wallis" words) "like the drip on the end of a Mississippi river pilot's beezer'.

Marcia had been graced with what was easily the most beautiful profile of any of the debutantes of 1922, but she was one of the few who had remained unmarried. She had contrived to meet Mark at last year's Ascot, by deliberately tipping strawberries-and-cream down the left leg of his trousers, and since then they had carried on a spasmodic, combative, irregular affair whenever their paths happened to cross.

Marcia's seasonal cycle took her to Paris in the springtime, then home to England for the Derby and Ascot, and London's high season,-then to the regatta at Cowes, off to Germany for a cure at Marienbad, Scotland for the fall shooting; followed by a winter cruise of the Mediterranean. Her friends always knew where Marcia was by the social calendar, but Mark only ever ran Into her by accident. That was what made their affair so exciting: the fact that after each brief bout of lovemaking, they might never actually meet again, ever. But they never said "goodbye'.

"I was astonished when Bangers told me you were here," said Marcia, kissing Mark on both cheeks as if he had just been awarded the Croixe-Guerre. She threw her silvery evening-purse down on the sofa, and opened the onyx cigarette-box on the table.

Mark offered her a light. "Who the hell's Bangers?" he wanted to know.

"The Honorable Phoebe Tawthome-Bangs," said Marcia, blowing smoke out of her nostrils. "She said she'd seen you at the Criterion, in the crash bar, but the crush had been too crushing to reach you. She did shout "cooee", but she's never had a very convincing voice."

"Can anybody say "cooee" convincingly?" grinned Mark.

"Bangers can't," said Marcia.

"Wallis," asked Mark, "will you bring me a fresh drink, please? A Ward Eight, and what's yours, Marcia?"

"Anything but champagne," said Marcia. "One gets so tired of champagne."

Mark sat down on the sofa and Marcia perched herself on his lap, her cigarette held at the very tips of her fingers. She tugged up the long hem of her dress so that she might be more comfortable, and also more provocative. Underneath the silver satin she wore silver silk stockings, with silver garters. Mark knew from experience that she rarely wore panties. She had an aura of perfume around her that was heavy with Gueriain's fashionable new Chamade.

Paris was so tiring this year," she said. Her eyes were the blandest blue that Mark could ever remember seeing, like a clear sky glimpsed through a frozen windowpane. "There were so many Americans there, begging your national pardon. I was taken to dinner at the Ritz one evening by Due de Gramont, and all around me there was positive ocean of Americans: Berry Wall, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, the Dolly sisters. And all braying, my darling, like hounds."

Mark touched her cheek, and twisted one of her curls around his finger. "I am sorry about the braying," he said. "I'll speak to Olivier about it."

"Oh, it wasn't really so bad," Marcia said, kissing the veins on the a Mark's wrist. "I was just feeling unusually vexatious. I feel better now that I'm here, with you. You have a wonderfully calming effect on me. You're like a good lunch."

"Well'—Mark smiled—"I've been compared to one or two things in my life: an ass and a thick-headed bullock. But never a good lunch."

Wallis came in with a tray of drinks—a Ward Eight for Mark, he being a good Bostonian; and a glass of very cold Polish vodka for Marcia, so frigid that it smoked.  The Ward Eight was a kind of bourbon sling, devised at Locke-Ober's Winter Palace Wine Rooms in Boston in the 1890s, and it was said to make the experience of being struck by lightning seem comparatively mild.

Once Wallis had retired to his quarters, with instructions not to disturb them, Mark and Marcia raised their glasses to each other. Marcia said, "Your man murmured that I shouldn't keep you longer than necessary. He said you had an important meeting with your company secretary."

"All my company secretary can do is to nag me about the deficiencies in my long-term planning. Besides that, he's in one of his bates. Isn't that what the English call it, a bate?"

They clinked glasses, and sipped their drinks. "Cherry vodka," said Marcia appreciatively, shifting herself on Mark's lap. "Your man may be fussy, but he has taste."

"We Americans aren't as ignorant as we seem," Mark told her, with the smile of an impudent boy. "We don't want very much out of life, but then there isn't ever very much of the best, is there?"

They kissed, with a fierceness and a hungriness that would have startled anyone who was secretly watching. The insides of their mouths were cold with ice and aromatic with spirits, and their tongues sought each other's teeth like chilly seals in Arctic waters.

"I always think I'm going to hate you when I see you again," breathed Marcia. "I always think I'm going to walk into the room and think how ugly you are, and how dull you are. But I never do. You always make me feel so abandoned. You make me feel as if I'm being swept away by a hurricane."

Mark said nothing, but sought her mouth again, and kissed her into breathless silence.

"Music," she said. "Why isn't there music?"

"They don't have victrolas in the rooms, that's why. I can hum, if you want me to. How about "Little Alabama Coon"? My father taught me that. I do the baby cry and the clog noises, too."

"God, you Americans are so romantic," said Marcia, in mock disdain. "I want music to dance to, music to make love to."

Mark shrugged, and tipped Marcia off his lap. He went across to the telephone, and tapped the bar for the hotel operator. "Get me the manager, will you? This is Mark Beeney. That's right."

Marcia, sitting on the floor with her back against the sofa and her dress right up to her slender thighs, sipped her drink and watched him with the smouldering coldness of a lascivious Ice Queen. He smiled at her, and one by one began to undo the buttons of his black vest.

"Is that the manager? This is Mark Beeney. Yes, fine. every thing's really fine. Well, I have a favour to ask. Sure. You had a string quartet playing at dinner this evening, am I right? I heard it on the way in. Do you think if they're all through in the restaurant they could come down to my room and play a little dance music outside of my door? Would that be too much to ask?"

Marcia threw her head back and laughed out loud. "You're mad," she sad. "Quite mad, but I adore you."

And so it was that in ten minutes" time, Mark and Marcia were dancing cheek-to-cheek around the sitting-room to the muffled waltz music of the Albemarle Quartet, who sat outside in the corridor on gilt chairs provided by the hotel management. Mark was naked, Marcia wore nothing but her pearls. As they danced, she pressed her small rose-nippled breasts against his chest, and he pressed the stiffened thrust of his penis against her bare stomach.

They made love on the Turkey rug, violently and greedily, while the quartet outside played "Les Roses" and then "We'll Meet Beyond the River". Marcia clutched her legs around Mark's back, and closed her eyes tight as he pushed and pushed inside her. He grasped her breasts so tightly that the flesh and nipples bulged between his fingers.

There was a moment for both of them when there was neither music nor light, no hotel, no rug, no day and no night. Then, his chest shiny with sweat, Mark knelt upright, and looked down at Marcia with that same stunned expression that Paavo Nurmi had had after running two miles in nine minutes. Marcia turned her face away, and that perfect 1922 profile was outlined by the pattern on the carpet. Her neck was flushed, and there were scarlet finger marks on her breasts.

"God, you're beautiful," she said, as if she were addressing the leg of the table. "But thank God I don't have to marry you. I think we'd drive each other mad."

Outside the hotel room, the music abruptly scraped and died. His body still sticky, Mark got up, went to the bedroom to find his blue silk bathrobe, and then went to the door. 

"I'm afraid we have to finish now, sir," said the violinist. "We don't wsh to disturb the other guests."

"You did a magnificent job," smiled Mark. He took four ten-pounds notes out of his wallet, and handed them one each. For each of them, ten pounds was the equivalent to three weeks" earnings.

Mark closed the door and came back into the sitting-room. Marcia was still naked, sitting in a deliberately dryadic pose on the sofa, the white pearls of Mark's semen clinging to the close-trimmed curls of her pubic hair. She sipped her vodka, and followed him with her cold, cold eyes.

"I suppose you're going back to America soon," she said.

He nodded. "I'm sailing on the Arcadia on Tuesday."

"Sailing on the competition? You surprise me."

"I'm looking forward to it. They've billed it as the most luxurious passenger liner afloat. I want to see if they can live up to their billing."

Marcia smiled at him provocatively. "How would you bill me, if you had to?"

"You? I'd bill you as the Mistress of the Century."

"You disappoint me. Not the millenium?"

"Give it time."

Marcia thought for a moment. Then she stood up, and came across to him, and reached out her hand so that her fingertips were touching his lips. "I don't want you to say anything," she said, "but I think I'm going to come to America with you."

He frowned, and was about to say something, but she pressed his lips to keep him silent. "I just have a feeling, that's all," she told him. "I don't think I'm ever going to see you again, not unless I come with you."

"You always said that you didn't mind if we saw each other again or not."

"Well, suddenly I do mind. Is that so terrible?"

"I don't know. You might as well understand that I'm not going to marry you."

"I don't expect you to," said Marcia. "I don't expect you to marry anybody. There isn't a girl alive who could keep you happy, not on her own."

Mark said, "What are you going to do? Sail on the Arcadia with me? All my staterooms are taken. Claude Graham-White's got one, and Victor Sorbay has the other."

"I'll book one for myself."

"They're all booked up."

"Then I'll make sure that somebody unbooks one. I'm coming, Mark, whether you want me to or not."

"I don't understand the panic," said Mark. "This isn't you. This isn't the cool, sophisticated Marcia Conroy; daughter of Lord and Lady Conroy of some muddy place in the English countryside I can't immediately remember."

Marcia was suddenly quiet. "I have a premonition, that's all," she said. "I felt a shiver come over me, like cold water."

"Here, borrow my bathrobe. You're feeling chilly, that's all."

"It's not that. I was always supposed to be rather psychic."

Mark stripped off his bathrobe and hung it around Marcia's shoulders. "A warm bath does wonders for a case of the premonitions," he told her, and kissed her close-cropped hair.

She looked up at him. "Yes, I suppose you're right. I am being rather absurd. Do you think your man could bring me another of those vodkas? I need to drink myself cheerful again."

They kissed once more, and then Marcia went through to the bedroom suite to take a bath. Mark watched her go, and stood in the centre of the room for a while, his hand thoughtfully covering his mouth, until the sound of faucets gushing disturbed his reverie.

He was about to pick up the telephone when the door opened and John Crombey stepped in. As usual, John was dressed with utter correctness, right up to the highly starched linen collar and the rosebud in his buttonhole. Only someone who knew him very well, as Mark did, could have guessed how angry he was. His nostrils were slightly widened, like an anxious thoroughbred horse, and there was a whiteness around his eyes which betrayed his sense of outrage and shock.

"You're naked," he pronounced in his marked Philadelphia accent.

"You could have knocked," Mark replied.

John Crombey turned around with exaggerated care and stared at door as if it should have knocked for him. "We had a meeting arranged for an hour ago," he said, still rigid with indignation. "I have all the figures you asked for: the Italian figures, how many long tons went in and out of Naples; the French figures, how many passengers sailed in and out of Cherbourg. I also have a comprehensive analysis of our entire business dealings with De Freitas, bills of lading, end-of-year accounts, financial prognoses. I understand from Wallis, however, that other considerations proved more attractive."

"Well," said Mark, "you're right. They did."

"I can't say that I'm not disappointed," said John Crombey. He pursed his lips.

"Oh? Well, I'm sorry, because I'm not," Mark told him. "And you can do something for me."

"Yes?" asked John, with cautious ire. His eyes were as black as a boiled lobster's.

"I want you to call the offices of Keys Shipping in Liverpool, if they're still open, and see if they have a single spare stateroom in first-class. If they don't, ask them to mail you a passenger list right away. Then go through it from A-Z, and see if you can't persuade someone to give up their stateroom for twice what they paid for it. I want just one first-class stateroom, that's all; but I want it booked in the name of the Honorable Miss Marcia Conroy. You got that?"

John Crombey said, "I see," suddenly deflated. He laid his sheaf of accounts and company reports down on the table in front of him. Mark looked up and Marcia was standing in the doorway, wearing a pink hotel bathcap, and wrapped in a huge white towel. Her face was pretty but unreadable. She might have been smiling. She might have been annoyed. Mark couldn't tell.

He said, "Are you through with my robe yet, Marcia? I'm beginning to feel like the Old Adam, standing here."

John Crombey thought for a second that Marcia was going to unwrap herself there and then, and flinched, as if someone had thrown a baseball directly at his face.

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.

SEVEN

It was raining much harder by the time Harry crossed the wooden boards of the landing stage at Liverpool's pierhead, pausing to let a puttering lorry pass in front of him with a load of clanking casks, and then dodging into the doorway of a small office building with a corrugated-iron roof. He turned left once he was inside the building, and walked along the corridor until he reached a small untidy workshop at the end. A fair-haired young nun in a long leather apron was standing at a bench, filing noisily at a length of copper piping. On the wall was a calendar for 1923 with a photograph of Ann Pennington, the Ziegfield girl with the "dimpled knees'.

Harry took off his cap and slapped the rain from it. "Good morning, Dennis," he said loudly.

Dennis stopped filing as if he hadn't been very interested in it anyway, and tossed the rasp onto the workbench with a loud clatter.

You're early, wacker," he said. "Janice kick you out of bed?"

"She's at work. I thought I'd come by here before I went over to Lime Street to see Jim."

Dennis nodded towards the workshop window. "Nice drop of rain, don't you think? Bring me leeks on. Do you fancy a cup of char?"

Harry shook his head. "I was wondering how the loading was going."

Dennis propped his bony bands on his hips. "All right, as far as I know." There was a hint of challenge hi his voice.

"Any suitable automobiles? Anything that's taken your eye?"

"Not especially."

"But there are automobiles here, ready to go on board?"

Dennis was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Some, yes. That's right."

Harry thoughtfully walked around the workbench and went up to the window. Beyond the clutter of low pierhead buildings, flagstaffs, and lamp standards; beyond the jostle of lorries and automobiles and people hurrying backwards and forwards in the showery wind, the outline of the Arcadia rose like a great black and white castle, towering a hundred feet out of the water.

Even from here, it was difficult to grasp the size of her. She was nearly a sixth of a mile long, and when she moved away from Liverpool's landing stage on Tuesday she would be carrying 2,275 passengers and crew. Pennants were already flapping from her masts and from her three huge yellow-painted funnels; and the red ensign furled and unfurled at her stern counter with laconic pride, stirred by the wind, untroubled by the rain.

Harry could see only a part of the Arcadia's hull from where he was standing, but she was the largest luxury liner in the world, from her sharp cruising prow to her shapely overhanging stern. Her oil-fired reciprocating engines, the very latest design, were easily capable of twenty-eight knots. Keys Shipping, of course, hoped that she could go much faster, and take the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing from the Mauritania, which had held it since 1907.

As Harry looked at the black-painted liner, and the scores of dockers and officials who clustered around her, he was reminded of the journalist who had said that "if you were followed by a cab coming out of Pennsylvania Station at twenty-five miles per hour, then you would have some conception of the Arcadia at speed."

He said to Dennis, "You've got something on your mind, haven't you? You're backing out."

Dennis shrugged. "It's not so much backing out, Harry. It's not that. It's a question of conscience. I mean, how many people on board that ship are going to be just plain people, like you and me? Working class. You're talking about drowning the very people you're supposed to be saving."

Harry turned away from the window."When did you work all this out?"

"You only have to look at the passenger roster," Dennis insisted. "Three hundred and seventeen first-class, two hundred and fifty second-class, six hundred and fifty steerage. You're going to drown nine hundred of ours just to get at three hundred of theirs? And children, too? It doesn't make sense."

Harry rubbed his eyes, as if he were thinking. "You thought it made sense before."

"I know. But I hadn't worked it out then."

"You've forgotten the ship itself," said Harry. "The ship itself is an embodiment of capitalist exploitation."

"Well, yes. Yes, it is. I've always said that. But the trouble is, our people are going to be on it. I mean, it's our people what are going to be thrashing around in the sea."

Harry said, "There always have to be casualties, in any war. This is a war, Dennis, make no mistake about it."

Dennis untied his apron, and folded it, and laid it over the workbench. "I know you get your accidental casualties," he said. "But this her too cold-blooded for me. Because what's going to happen when she goes down? Same as on the Titanic, I shouldn't wonder. They saved over half of the first-class passengers, on the Titanic, but less than a quarter of the steerage. And then there's the crew, over a thousand of them. A thousand working men. Are you going to risk their lives, too?"

Harry turned away from the window. "You're getting hysterical about this, Dennis. If everything goes to plan, then nobody need drown. Not one single person, rich or poor."

"I suppose you can guarantee that," said Dennis, crossing his arms in the way that working-men do when they feel defiant. ...