Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  He said, ‘Will you dance?’

  ‘I ‒ I’m awfully stupid at it.’

  ‘Never mind, I’ll teach you.’ He thought, ‘Where did she get that quite divine blue? It matches her eyes.’ And he slipped his arm round her. The assistant purser could dance. He had joined the merchant service because he believed that it would give him facilities for exhibiting his terpsichorean powers. He had stipulated for a line where he would be permitted to exhibit this skill, and had finally emerged from Pangbourne here. Now he wasn’t so sure that he was so well pleased with himself, or the line, or the terpsichorean arts. Such amazingly old women danced, and when they were on the mail run, all the women seemed to be old. Dear old trouts with long earrings and coy frocks, and the I-will-be-a-girl expression. So far he had been disappointed in pleasure cruising also. He was no better than a gigolo. A gigolo of the line, he told himself. Because he danced so well, and was so junior, the purser had a little habit of allotting aged-partners to him.

  ‘You must dance with old Lady So-and-so; she is a special friend of the directors,’ or ‘You must give that fat old lady a turn, she hasn’t had much of a time.’ And, as to Mr. Collins himself, he seldom had much of a time! There was usually only one good-looker a trip, that was the average; and if the Commander could be persuaded to keep off it, there was the first officer, and the second officer ‒ he was the Spanish type, and that always has a mean advantage ‒ and the third officer who had a ‘way wid him’. You could not defy competition of that sort.

  So the A. P. had formed a convenient habit of drifting into tea dances, when the others were busy, and when the purser was enjoying a prolonged siesta, which, as he was getting old and somewhat stout, ran far into the afternoon, and was only broken by cocktail time. The A. P. having thus arranged things to a nicety, quite often contrived (as he expressed it) to pick a daisy during tea. Ann could not dance, but she had rhythm. He knew that the moment he put an arm round her. He gave her a few hints which she received gratefully. He admired her frock, and finally he told her that she was the best looker in the ship, which left her entirely bewildered.

  The A. P. was in the habit of telling every girl that she was the best looker in the ship, but Ann was not to know that. She danced as only a woman can dance when she suddenly finds all the elusive fantasies of youth no longer elusive and no longer fantasies. Suddenly life seemed new and different. She supposed she was old enough to be the A. P.’s mother, he could not be twenty, well ‒ almost his mother! All the same that did not lessen the delight of the dance, of the atmosphere, of the new knowledge of fantasy come true, of the elusive overtaken and become reality.

  She said with the ingenuous enthusiasm of a girl, ‘This is the loveliest cruise in the world.’

  VI

  Night in Marseilles.

  Late night, just before sailing, a night of sapphire and of emeralds. High up on the hill twinkled the little lights, like so many stars in a new heaven. And above them all the golden Madonna who guards the goings and the comings of the sailors. The sea was an unbelievable blue, and Ann, watching it, leaning on the taffrail with Oliver by her side, knew that it was carrying her away. The water was clear, and very still; in it lay further stars, drowned.

  ‘I never want to leave Marseilles,’ she said, ‘it is a city of romance.’

  ‘But you are going to Naples. If ever there was a city of romance, it is Naples.’

  She shook her head. She was the new Ann clasped in satin, with a pink chiffon frock frothing about her in little cascades and frills. ‘In Marseilles I grew young,’ she said.

  ‘Had you never been young before?’

  ‘No, never.’

  He nodded. ‘I know. There are too many women who live life and never know youth. You’re lucky.’

  ‘I’m terribly lucky,’ she said.

  She was enjoying it to the full, this new precious youth. Now she did not care if he were married, or divorced, or what it might be. What did anything matter? Well, of course it didn’t.

  ‘I had a cable from Lilia,’ he said. ‘Funny that she has found her romance on a pleasure cruise that is ended, and she wires to me on a pleasure cruise that is starting.’

  Ann clung to the taffrail. Sapphire water, sapphire hills, and above it all a great deep sky in the same sapphire. It was just as though the whole world had become a brilliant and beautiful jewel, and she was wearing it on her heart. Her world. Her jewel. She said, ‘To-night everything looks unreal and very beautiful.’

  ‘Yet in our hearts we know that it is real and not very beautiful. Marseilles is one of the most sordid cities in the Mediterranean.’

  ‘Yet to-night she looks lovely.’

  Then the A. P. came up and asked her to dance. Later, much later, when she went to her cabin and unclipped the pink chiffon frock from about her, and slipped out of the satin corselet which was so graceful and which gave such a new feeling of liberty, a horrid thought assailed her. Pink chiffon frock. Fifinelle. She did a rapid mental sum. There had been some four thousand francs owing, and she had left one thousand on deposit. She had rushed back to the purser’s office, and in her hurry, and harassed by the somewhat irksome companionship of Miss Bright, she had paid the entire four thousand francs. She had forgotten all about the thousand on deposit, with the lamentable result that she had grossly overpaid Madame. And Madame, her little red tongue in her cheek, had said never a word. Why should she trouble to remind someone of a little error of that type? argued Madame. Why indeed?

  Ann, the new determined Ann, told herself that she would cable in the morning. She did not suppose that she stood a ghost of a chance of getting the thousand francs back, but she would try. She would at least tell Madame what she thought of her, and that would be some small comfort.

  As she undressed, stepping carefully out of peach-coloured cami-knickers of the type that Cuthbert would have attributed to Jezebel, she thought unrepeatable things of Madame. There was an immense comfort even in being able to think them.

  Chapter 4

  I

  In between the ports, the ship settled down into its normal routine. Its breakfast and beef tea; its lunch and tea dance; its savouries and supper routine.

  Ann was beginning to fit into the scheme of things, she was beginning to think of the ship as home and to enjoy it. She knew nearly everybody at least by sight, and most of them to speak to, though it seemed to be impossible to discover what their names might be. But what did names matter really?

  Miss Bright had after the affair at Marseilles attached herself to Ann, who did not reciprocate the feeling of extreme and rather overpowering friendship. She made excuses, unfortunately feeble excuses, and she tried to dodge Miss Bright round the decks. But large as the liner was, and many as were her decks, it seemed very difficult to lose anybody you wanted to lose; just as it was also very difficult to find anybody you wanted to find.

  Ann went to the purser and he helped her to devise a Marconi to Fifinelle. He was strongly biased against traders in foreign ports. In the Mediterranean, he said with more than a little truth, they were a very dirty lot. The Marconi was handed in, and despatched.

  Through a sea unbelievably still, the Allando urged forward. She steamed with hardly a sound, seldom a movement, only an occasional tremble of her engines, beating within her.

  ‘It’s very seldom that we get both the Bay and the Gulf of Lyons bad,’ Miss Brown told Ann when she brought her her morning apple, ‘it’s one or the other, but not often both. Best to get it over in the Bay and have done with it.’

  Under the fine warm weather the ship prospered. Fans became busy. The roses that the chief steward had brought aboard at Marseilles stood about in bowls, rising and falling a little with the ship. It was summer on board. A summer born miraculously soon of the dead English winter.

  Ann had rolled her tweeds into a bundle and had forsaken them. They were useless anyway in this heat. Now she could not think how she had ever tolerated them for a moment. Badly-made, and with
ill-fitting cut. What had induced her? Soft silk, piquant little coats, sheer stockings, strapped shoes. It was a new Ann. It was a woman enjoying the St. Martin’s summer of her life.

  Long and lazy mornings with the beef tea arriving as an agreeable break, and the thrill of the tote. Ann had resisted the attractions of the tote, knowing full well how Cuthbert would have thought about it, but unfortunately Oliver exploited a shilling for her one day. She found herself surging forward in the little crowd which awaited the arrival of the officer from the bridge soon after noon, in such breathless anticipation. She experienced all that fever of excitement, she glowed. The number was the one on which Ann’s shilling had been placed.

  It seemed to be all wrong that Ann, who was very well aware of the sinfulness of such forms of amusement, and who was dragged into it by other people, first Miss Thomas and now Oliver Banks, should habitually win. She overcame the first intention of giving it to charity, which had seemed to her to be the only way to condone the offence. She put a whole five shillings on the tote the next day, not a single one of which brought her in a farthing. ‘And that serves me right,’ she told herself.

  The swimming bath was in constant demand, a pale green pool aft, deliciously clear and refreshing. Until now it had been more or less avoided by the passengers, save those more daring males who had taken their morning dip in Spartan fashion from the beginning. Now young women besieged it. Young women with fat legs, young women with thin legs, young women in home-knitted bathing dresses, and in bought bathing dresses, some a great deal too revealing, and others not half revealing enough. Fergus, who was a stickler for the swimming pool, and attended it vigorously every day of his life, seethed in wrath. There were the young women determined to grow brown, who covered themselves in oil, ‘guaranteed to give that sun-bronze tone which is so distinguished’; they then went into the water. ‘Now it is nothing but an oil bath,’ he protested, ‘always having to be changed, always coming out like a blinking sardine!’ He hated it.

  Above was the deck reserved for sunbathing, and here people in various attitudes of undress sprawled and disported themselves. Many an illusion of the previous night in a Paris frock of superb cut was shattered by the simple bathing dress on a figure that could not cope with its revealing lines.

  Ann thought at first that it was most indecent, but the heat becoming fiercer as the sun beat down on the decks, she made up her mind that at Naples she herself would buy a bathing dress, a modest one of course, and she also would enjoy the coolness of the pale green swimming pool. Supposing she could go brown? Supposing she could return to the office and show arms and neck sun-bronzed according to the directions on the bottle? She had half a mind to try. The spirit of competition entered into it.

  ‘You’ll come to Pompeii with me?’ said Oliver as they danced that night.

  Pompeii! It was true then. She was standing on the threshold of the dream world of Naples; of ruined Pompeii; of the blue bay with Vesuvius across it. She was glad. She was tremendously, supremely glad that she had not saved the money, but had come here. Mr. Robert had been quite right in his advice. She had bought happiness, she had bought youth. The old hag in the Alameda had warned her: ‘Make much of life while you are still young, look at me!’ This was making much of life; paying in coin but gaining in kind.

  ‘I’d love it,’ she said.

  II

  As Ann went down to her cabin, Miss Bright buttonholed her. Miss Bright was standing on D deck aft, near the little door where at stipulated intervals Fergus held his surgery. In her young days Miss Bright had been ‘sort of engaged to a doctor, nothing settled, you know, but an understanding’. She believed that this period of her life had given her a strange insight into the medical profession. She was surprised when doctors did not reciprocate her interest in them.

  ‘I wanted to see you,’ she said to Ann. ‘I wanted to ask; if you would let me come to Pompeii with you in the morning. I would be willing to share expenses.’

  Now on the Marseilles trip, although Miss Bright had volunteered to share expenses, no actual money had been forthcoming. At the moment of settling up, she had been entirely preoccupied with something else. She had not been very helpful in the purchasing of the frocks, and her French had been execrable. Ann started telling her about Oliver, but she would not listen. She was full of other theories.

  ‘I hear,’ she said, ‘that the Pompeians have the most peculiar signs in the streets, really odd. And some of the frescoes cannot be shown to decent women. Personally I am broad-minded. Little things like that do not upset me. I look on them in the spirit of art, which is the way they should be looked at, I feel. I thought, you see, that if we were together we could enjoy everything to the full.’ By which it was very obvious that she meant the strange street signs, and the frescoes that could not be shown to decent women.

  ‘Well, I’m very sorry, but I’ve fixed up to go ashore with Mr. Banks.’

  ‘Oh’ ‒ Miss Bright registered extreme disapproval ‒ ‘now isn’t that too bad? Perhaps he would not mind if I joined you?’

  Ann thought that probably Oliver would mind very considerably. She was trying to think out some suitable and wholly polite excuse, when three girls came down the companion laughing together and talking.

  ‘He wanted me to meet him on the boat deck,’ one of them was saying, ‘and what’s more I’m going to. I believe in having my little bit of fun.’

  ‘Oh, but you don’t know what he said to me this evening. I tell you I was absolutely shocked, and it takes a lot to shock me.’

  ‘Well, I may be shocked too after to-night, and I hope I am. I don’t believe in being too good …’

  They passed along together, laughing, with their arms intertwined, going down to E deck.

  ‘Well now,’ said Miss Bright, ‘I do not approve of how these modern young people behave, really I don’t. It is most odd.’

  It was easy enough for Miss Bright who would never see fifty again, but Ann was in the unfortunate position of not being of Miss Bright’s generation, and not of the post-war gay girls who believed in their little bit of fun, and wanted to be shocked. For a long time she had believed herself to be of that older generation. Was she not born in Victoria’s reign? But now she had abandoned herself to the joy of the wonder cruise.

  If she had come here five years later it would have been too late. But, thank heaven, it wasn’t too late. She ran her fingers over her hair where it was clipped close to her neck.

  ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t very well ask Mr. Banks,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t mind asking him,’ declared Miss Bright.

  ‘I don’t think we could. I mean he would not understand. I’d rather you didn’t.’ And Ann felt herself reddening as she turned away.

  ‘Oh well, if that’s the way the land lies …’ said Miss Bright in snorting indignation, and she blundered up the companion. She was going to have a look round the boat deck. Other people seemed to find it very interesting and she did not see why she should not investigate.

  ‘Oh dear, now I’ve offended her,’ thought Ann, ‘and she is old and has no fun, and it is rotten of me.’ She went for a little stroll round D deck. She went softly, watching the pale gold ribbon of moonlight reaching right across the water, which was so still as to be almost rippleless. She heard two people talking and recognized the blasé high-pitched voice of Ethel.

  ‘I call this cruise bloody, perfectly bloody.’

  With a start Ann realized that she was not of this generation. She never could be. She wasn’t even of this cruise. It was just a cinema, a film flickered before her eyes, bright people, people she did not really know, like a patchwork quilt thrown across her. Patches of silk. Gay colours. Dull colours. People.

  She would wake up and find herself at home, with a good white honeycomb counterpane, and life would be all the deadlier for this. Perhaps she had made a mistake in coming. Perhaps…

  III

  They were alongside the mole when she went on deck t
he next morning. The town of Naples rose in little white terraces with the palm trees standing erect, and the heliotrope veil of wistaria laid finely like a lace on balustrade and portico. The houses came right down to the mole, alongside which the ship was tied, and where all the touts and rascals you could possibly imagine were collected. The taxicabs drawn up rank upon rank, were all driven by men who looked as though they could easily have filled the roles of the robbers in the Babes in the Wood. Lean horses, almost dropping in their shabby harness, pulled crazy carriages, and were only beaten for their pains. Opposite, blue, serene, and entirely oblivious to the pain and suffering that might go on in this day of surpassing beauty and woeful brutality, stood Vesuvius.

  When first Ann saw Vesuvius, she felt that here indeed was a dream come true. Only the merest filament of smoke curled about the summit. There was little outward sign of it being anything but a mountain, standing as it had always stood, and not the shell, the husk which concealed the fire devil who had wrought such vengeance. But, as she watched, her mind going back to the days when she had pored over the tragedy of Glaucus and blind Nydia, she saw the faint wisps of smoke trembling upwards until they became cloud and part of the heaven, instead of part of the hell that was volcano.