Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  The kind-heartedness which had prompted the gift would never be taken into consideration by Cuthbert, who had an unfortunate aptitude for looking on the worst side of any situation. In the train bound for Charing Cross, where of necessity one changed on to the Balham and Tooting route, Ann suddenly remembered Cuthbert’s rooted objection to people who shopped on a Sunday, and she realized that, instead of assisting her cause, she would be very seriously damaging it.

  She tried to leave the pink tulips behind her at Charing Cross station, getting up hurriedly and rushing for the door as fast as she could go. A well-intentioned but misguided young Cockney grabbed the tulips and pursued her.

  ‘Here, miss, yer flaws!’ said he.

  Redly Ann accepted them and thanked him with a heart that was overfilled with embarrassment and fury. She must rid herself of the hateful things.

  Just as the Balham train came in she crammed the tulips into one of the wire baskets which desired you to place your rubbish in its depths. Two women watched her and said loudly, ‘Oh my! Look at her! Such beautiful flowers too.’ They gazed at her as, hot and confused, she leapt on to the train.

  She had not cooled by the time she got to Clapham. Naturally she was worried. Usually she felt that there were too many Claphams on the tube, but to-day there could not be enough. She wanted time to think. She did not want to get to Balham with the painful necessity of explaining the somewhat complicated matters to Cuthbert. The train got to Balham too soon, and she got out and walked as slowly as she could up the road. She thought to-day that it looked very Balham-ish. Far more Balham-ish than ever before, and all because she was thinking of the cruise, and the cruise was going to be so wonderful.

  The first green lay on the trees of Tooting Bec Common. The first dim reflection lay smudgily on the stillness of the pond. The youth of the year with its beauty attracted her, and suddenly she felt that, whatever anybody else might say, she knew she had done the right thing. Mr. Robert had known what he was talking about, and she was glad that she had taken hold of the opportunity while she had the chance. Whatever Cuthbert might say she was not going back on it now. However he tried to dissuade her, she was determined to go through with the project. In any case the company would refuse to return the passage money, so anyway it was spent now, and she meant to have something for it.

  She turned in at the gate full of determination.

  It was a neat wooden gate, with ‘The Manse’ in beaten copper upon it. Inside was a square of green, with a round flowerbed in the middle, and triangular flower-beds at each corner. Up one side ran a neat asphalt path. Cuthbert had had the path asphalted because it saved weeding, and although he had conscientiously allotted this task to his wife and daughter ‒ ‘A labour of love,’ he airily termed it ‒ in time their constant complaints had become irksome. There were laurels at the side of the path, which led straight to the house and was neatly tiled.

  Behind the porch stood the house itself, and it was essentially the right setting for Cuthbert, just the right background. There was the bow window of the seldom used drawing-room which jutted out of the ground floor, and up above it the corresponding window of Cuthbert’s bedroom, the windows firmly closed and discreetly draped in Nottingham lace. At the back of the house there was the dining-room, and the spare room above it, with Gloria’s and the maid’s rooms at the side.

  Ann opened the front door a little timidly; they always left it on the latch about the time that they knew she would be there. From inside there came the familiar smell of furniture-polish and of soap, and Ann, stepping on the aptly named slip-mat, proceeded to slip violently. Eleanor was enthusiastic about cleanliness. She rather overdid it. One of these days Ann firmly believed that Cuthbert would break his neck entering his own house.

  There was a square hall, with a hat-stand on the right, where Cuthbert’s saucer hat (token of his being within) hung, and on the left what the house agent had been pleased to term ‘the usual offices’. Cuthbert had been very pleased over that, for the old house which they had had before this had been ill equipped, and he was always telling people about the excellent arrangements in this new house of his.

  He now came out, drying his hands on a small towel and smelling very pungently of disinfectant soap. Eleanor did not believe in scented soaps; disinfectants appealed to her imagination, perfumes she considered to be a little fast. Cuthbert was a small man, a round little man, with a small cherubic face and a bricky red colour. He wore a rather old-fashioned clerical coat, on which there were traces of previous meals, for Cuthbert had always been careless about eating. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, and his hair was rapidly retreating from his forehead, leaving a smooth and polished band of whiteness, in rather unpleasant contrast to the brick-red of the rest of his face. He was wiping his small fat hands carefully as he came out.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ said he, with the rather dreadful cheerfulness that he sometimes adopted to Ann, ‘and how is Ducky to-day?’ If there was one thing that Ann disliked, it was being called Ducky. When she had been born, Cuthbert, a large flaxen child believed by his mother to be what is known as a beautiful boy, had looked at his young red sister and had called her an ugly duckling. This remark had been considered to be clever. Still, although the years rolled by, whenever he assumed one of his playful moods he addressed Ann as Ducky! She loathed it. She loathed it insistently, and more especially at this moment. She had prayed that Cuthbert would not be playful. She had prayed desperately hard about it. Always when he was in this mood he was particularly deadly, and she had got to break her news to him. Cuthbert had a paralysing effect upon Ann.

  She said, ‘Oh, hello,’ and waited breathlessly.

  Eleanor came out of the dining-room. ‘That you, Ann? It’s your auntie, Gloria.’

  Eleanor hadn’t worn well. She wore tweeds and she had not got a complexion suitable for tweeds. As a matter of fact her face was not unlike a good heather mixture itself. She had little eyes, dark and beady, whereas Cuthbert’s were pale blue. She was getting a stomach. Behind her came Gloria, who was pale, for she outgrew her strength. She was sandy and had freckles. A weedy-looking girl, Ann thought. A striking-looking girl her parents thought. Having inherited her father’s unfortunate astigmatism, she wore glasses, and this gave her the appearance of poking forward. They were not an attractive-looking family though their worthiness was most apparent.

  Ann kissed them: Cuthbert who was warm and moist, Eleanor who was hot but dry, Gloria who was cold and flabby.

  ‘Such a lovely day,’ said Cuthbert; ‘twenty-five communicants at the eight o’clock, and such a lot at eleven. You counted them, Eleanor?’

  ‘I’m afraid …’ she faltered.

  ‘You certainly should have counted them. It was most irregular. There must have been over thirty.’

  ‘Oh, certainly over thirty,’ from the flustered Eleanor; and then, ‘lunch is quite ready, I think. Run up and take off your things, Ann, or Gloria will run up with them for you. Take Auntie’s coat and hat, dear.’

  Ann handed them over, and while Gloria tramped upstairs with them the other three went into the dining-room. Lunch was set, with a highly polished brass bowl of ferns in the middle and the cruet alongside. The cold leg of lamb lifted itself mutely from the dish.

  ‘You ought to have counted,’ Cuthbert was saying. He was still concerned with the number of communicants.

  Ann said: ‘The garden is looking very nice. The daffies are coming on beautifully. You have got a lot more out than you had last week.’

  ‘It was the warm Wednesday,’ Eleanor told her; ‘there was such a lot of sunshine.’

  ‘There must have been over thirty,’ remarked Cuthbert, though he was not talking of the sunshine.

  ‘Any news?’ asked Ann as they sat round the table. ‘Has anything happened?’

  Cuthbert, as he carved the lamb, which bore sorry marks of his previous maltreatment, gave her the news in a nutshell. ‘We had the Mothers’ Meeting on Tuesday, and it was most successful. On
Wednesday Eleanor and I went round and collected in several of the envelopes of self-denial, which were out for Lent. The results were hardly up to our expectations; they were distinctly disappointing.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘On Friday we started our mission services, and I think I may say that the first was a great success, oh, a very great success. Now, what have you been doing?’

  Now was the moment. She knew that it was the very moment in which she had got to speak. All the way here she had been telling herself to be brave and go straight at it. And now here she was at it. Only she couldn’t. Not with Cuthbert looking at her like that. Not with Eleanor and Gloria in patient attitudes of meek attention. Ann funked it.

  She said, ‘Oh, nothing much,’ knowing perfectly well that it had been the week of her life, that it had epitomized the one week when everything had happened, just everything.

  ‘Mr. Robert is well?’ asked Eleanor. She had a great respect for Mr. Robert, whom she had never met, but whom she looked upon as being some lesser relation of the Deity Himself.

  ‘Oh yes, he is all right.’ She thought to herself: ‘This is awful,’ and then consoled herself that she would tell them after lunch. It would be easier then; they would be full fed, and Cuthbert would have got over Eleanor having failed to count the communicants. It had been very remiss of her.

  With very little appetite Ann settled down to her lunch. At the end of it …

  III

  They talked of all manner of things, and all the while it kept recurring to Ann what nonsense it all was. All the little events had been quite eventless, the matters quite matterless. None of them had been of the least importance. Cuthbert was mercifully so full of himself and his own absurd little doings, that he did not notice that Ann had gone quiet. Eleanor rambled on, then she remarked on Ann’s silence when she refused a second helping of rhubarb.

  ‘Not feeling well, Ducky?’ she inquired.

  Ducky! As if that helped to make you feel well! ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she said.

  She saw the pock-marked cheese coming out. Soon she would be obliged to tell them. Soon. She felt quite sick about it. Unfortunately the conversation took on a turn of its own. Cuthbert full of cold lamb and pink rhubarb remarked on the happenings of the week.

  ‘I never open a newspaper but what I realize that as a nation we grow more and more degenerate,’ he said. ‘Now there is this appalling sweepstake business.’

  Could anything be less propitious? she asked herself. She put up a foolish defence, fully realizing its futility. ‘I think the hospitals benefit.’

  Cuthbert looked at her over the top of his glasses. ‘Hospitals benefit indeed!’ said he. ‘Nobody benefits by money sinfully obtained. Nobody ever will,’ and he looked at her as much as to say: ‘deny it if you can!’

  After that of course the only thing left was to mention it quietly and casually as best you could even though your heart sank. ‘Well, I won something though I never knew that I had a ticket in it.’ Never had her voice seemed so loud! She felt the atmosphere grow tense. She heard Eleanor’s sharp intake of breath, and Gloria’s sniff (she suffered from a chronic catarrh). She felt Cuthbert galvanize all his senses.

  ‘You ‒ you won in a sweepstake?’ he demanded.

  She started telling them, and it was the more dreadful because they waited to let her tell them all. It sounded too silly. She had not realized that it was a ticket in a sweepstake at all; she had thought that it was something to do with a raffle, and anyway she had not expected to win anything out of it. Then she had heard the great news, she had received the cheque, she was the richer by three hundred pounds.

  ‘Of course,’ said Cuthbert sententiously when she had finished, ‘you will return it?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ she replied, ‘why, I have spent some of it already.’

  The worst was yet to come!

  ‘Spent it?’ he repeated, ‘spent it? Why, it might have been invested in a trust fund.’

  ‘A trust fund?’

  ‘Certainly. You have responsibilities, you know. There is your goddaughter.’

  Ann did not see why she should be made to hand over any of the money to Gloria. That was the sort of idea that would present itself to Cuthbert! He had more to say.

  ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘I think it was disgraceful of you buying a ticket in such a thing, even though you were not fully aware that it was a sweepstake. Ill-gotten gains never did bring happiness with them.’

  ‘That’s why I shall not put them into a trust fund for Gloria,’ declared Ann. Usually Cuthbert paralysed her with fright so that she dare not answer back, but to-day she felt different. The knowledge of the ticket for the cruise gave her a certain assurance. Cuthbert was not used to argument; while he was recovering from the shock of it Eleanor said, ‘Tst, tst,’ between her teeth, and, ‘I don’t think you ought to speak to Cuthbert like that, Ducky, really I don’t.’

  He recovered himself. ‘I am pained,’ he said. ‘I am surprised. I cannot tell you what a shock this has been to me. To think that a sister of mine has stooped to gambling!’

  ‘I didn’t gamble.’

  ‘You won three hundred pounds for five shillings. A pure gamble,’ he said, and an icy tone had come into his voice. ‘And now let us hear what you have done with the money.’

  They waited with a rather dreadful patience to hear what she had to say next.

  ‘I ‒ I have kept most of it,’ she began, ‘then the rest I am spending on a holiday.’

  Cuthbert brightened considerably. Undoubtedly she was contemplating taking them all to Worthing to a good hotel. That was not so bad. Most of his Easter offering went on his holiday. It was never very large, for Cuthbert was not popular in his parish. If he could save the Easter offering he would be able to have the spare bedroom papered and painted, and some new bookshelves put into his study. Of recent years he had not found the Worthing lodgings too comfortable, though habit drove them back there every June. It would be far preferable to be in one of the hotels. Nothing with a palm lounge or a ballroom or a licence of course.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ he said, ‘that is an excellent idea. Then we shall all participate.’

  Eleanor looked relieved, even Gloria smiled wanly. Ann felt her heart sinking. ‘I,’ she began again, ‘I am not going to Worthing. Mr. Robert suggested that I should go on a cruise, and I have booked a passage. I start Thursday week for the Mediterranean.’

  Whilst she had been speaking a change had come over the three faces before her. She knew that Cuthbert was conjuring up visions of what the Mediterranean meant. For him the ruined temples still held ghosts of Vestal Virgins ‒ misguided young women with strange motives. Naples was a Papist stronghold. They used incense. They burnt candles. They did not recognize the same God however much they might stipulate that they did. Liners were full of vice. They had intoxicating liquor out of bond, whatever that might mean, and they danced all night.

  He said, ‘It would be an abominable thing for you to do. To go off like that into foreign parts without a chaperon, I have never heard of such a thing.’

  Ann had expected to be entirely crushed by Cuthbert; deep down in her heart there was the secret terror that she might be tempted to give up the project because of his interference, but now it had an entirely different effect upon her. She felt rebellion stirring within her. She was amazed at her own courage.

  ‘I am thirty-five,’ she told him, ‘chaperons are out of date. I’ve always wanted to see the Mediterranean and now I am going to see it.’ She added in a fit of daring, ‘So there!’

  The effect was extraordinary.

  First of all Cuthbert was longing to tell Ann exactly what he felt about it all, but he was sadly handicapped. He remembered that she had come into a certain sum of money. It was not a very large sum it is true, but Cuthbert had an extremely material outlook, he was also a dutiful father, and he would not stand in Gloria’s way for a single moment. He was torn between his fury at the impossible
attitude adopted by his sister, and his paternal duty. Obviously Ann’s success had gone to her head. She did not know what she was doing. In a crazy moment he thought of fortune-hunters whom she might meet abroad. In this mood anything might happen. He composed himself for argument.

  IV

  Nobody ate any cheese. Nobody ate anything else. Cuthbert, controlled and cool, argued along every line of illogical reasoning. He argued with a tendency to fierceness which he did his best to check. Eleanor resorted to tears soon after the argument began; she knew that crying made her nose red, but she couldn’t help that. Gloria, who did not quite gather what it was all about, looked from one to the other and sniffed. Her sniffings had the effect of infuriating Ann to distraction. The black marble clock which had been presented to Cuthbert by grateful parishioners when they heard he was leaving his previous parish to come to Balham, tinkled out the hour. It was getting late. The urgencies of the Sunday School must break up any argument. Cuthbert realized it. He rose.

  ‘We will continue this at tea-time,’ he said.

  Ann, seeing her chance, took it. ‘I can’t stop to tea.’

  ‘What? But you have always stayed to tea.’

  ‘I know, only I can’t to-day.’ What she really meant was that she daren’t to-day. She did not know how she had been brave enough to suggest it, but now, as she had suggested it, she was going to stick to it. She was not going back on it, for if she did stay to tea, life would be intolerable.

  ‘You can’t go,’ said Eleanor, and she clung to her arm, ‘oh, Ducky, you can’t go. We must talk about it.’

  As if they hadn’t been talking a great deal too much in the last half hour! As if …! The maid came in with a large tin tray to clear away the unlovely debris of the meal. They went into the hall.