Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

She ought to be able to think of something to say to Oliver or in her letter to Cuthbert, but she couldn’t. Her mind was a blank. It seemed like blotting paper, events smudged in, and that was all. It wasn’t any use for anything else at all.

  Then the disposal of the savouries in their silver dishes diverted her attention. Green lettuce, prawns in pink curls, white and yellow egg against the gleaming silver of sardines. Caviare. The caviare gave her an idea. Oliver loved it.

  She approached the steward cautiously, for she had always had an idea that he was a sort of officer, though what sort she really did not know. She enquired if some caviare could be sent down to someone’s cabin? The steward looked at her in the manner that conveyed that he had not realized before that she was ‘that sort of young lady’. He said coldly that doubtless it could be arranged. Ann interpreted his glance, turned crimson, and stammered out the number of the cabin. As it happened she had only come to know that by accident, because he had made a fuss about the first cabin allotted to him, and it had been changed.

  The steward said it should be fixed, and his fingers closed over the half-crown timidly proffered. It seemed to her a dreadful lot of money for a very little job, but seeing the way that he had looked, she had not dared to offer less. Even now she was quite sure that he looked upon her as being promiscuous. Caviare in a gentleman’s cabin did sound a little odd, when you came to think about it. No one would ever believe that she had done it out of pure goodness of heart, out of an overwhelming sympathy for a fellow-being in distress, though when she considered it, she was not sure that he was in distress. And all her upbringing told her that was the worst part of it, and all her recent experience of human nature told her that, under the circumstances, it was quite understandable.

  She got up to go across the lounge, for the steward was getting a small silver dish out of the locker, and was filling it with strips of toast decorated with caviare. He poised them on a couple of forks with the air of a professional juggler. Every little while he glanced at Ann coldly and critically. Even the half-crown had not silenced him. He still looked things.

  As she moved to the companion, he pursued her. He held the small silver dish at arm’s length as though it contained a bad smell.

  ‘Will that be sufficient, Madam?’

  Caviare cuddled among shredded lettuce of a delicate pale green shade.

  ‘It will do very nicely indeed,’ she said and hurried away, redder than ever.

  She went down to the deck beneath and pretended to interest herself in the barber’s shop window. It was not in the least interesting. Inside a large and flamboyant Jewess was being begged to ‘choose something for herself’ by a little fat man who had obviously had a success with her.

  ‘Anything you like, dearie,’ begged the little fat man, and he pointed to a stand of morocco handbags.

  But the Jewish lady was interested in bags of a different nature. The barber had some lovely sets of Chinese embroidered underwear. The lady examined them carefully; she even held them up to the light, to study the cut, which was most embarrassing for the little man and even for Ann outside. How could the woman do it? she asked herself. But the woman could. You can do a lot when you are used to being trotted down to the barber’s shop every few minutes by different satisfied clients. She had morocco bags in abundance; she did not want any more. Now lingerie was a different matter; she fingered it lovingly. She was not going to be hurried for anybody.

  The little fat man had been what she called ‘fussy’; one of the persistent sort, and she considered she had earned any little souvenir that he liked to give her.

  Ann could bear it no longer. She went along the alley slowly. What should she do? Perhaps she could have a bath. The bath steward disillusioned her on that score. All the baths were booked.

  In the café the A. P. had had the ping-pong table erected and was busily engaged in trying to do what he called ‘wipe the floor with the third officer’. But the third officer was a dark horse. He had, it transpired, once beaten Borotra at ping-pong! It wasn’t Borotra’s game, of course, but still it was a bit of a feat. The A. P. was enduring such a slamming that he was seething with indignation. He liked to win games. He was years younger than the third officer, and he had more ‘puff’. He was furious at having met his Waterloo.

  Ann went on to D deck, where there was the last glimpse of Vesuvius, unrelenting against the sky. As she watched, it threw up a crimson glow, the same deep glow as the sunset. She thought of the dead city lying under it, the dead city where they had walked and had talked and had been so completely happy just about the same time as poor Lilia had been killed.

  A dead city, and Lilia was dead too.

  ‘Life seems to be all wrong,’ she told herself.

  III

  She did not see Oliver at dinner. Mrs. Duncan and Ethel were gaily exaggerating about what had happened at Naples. They had been ashore to a very grand hotel to dance, and everybody had been quite mad about Ethel. Oh, quite mad!

  ‘Of course with that fair hair of hers,’ said her mother, ‘she does attract the Latin races so much.’

  According to her mother it was very difficult to find the man whom Ethel did not attract. Everyone loved her. Everyone! Why, she had once met a Russian Grand Duke who had put the second shot into Rasputin, and he ‒

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ from Ethel, who in spite of a certain show of modesty was vastly pleased at stories of that sort.

  In this hotel however things had gone with too much of a swing, for while mother was purring her satisfaction over a cup of tea in the corner, and Ethel was dancing with an Italian gentleman (‘I’m sure that he was a duke or something, dear, he had that kind of manner’), another had come in. He had challenged the first to a duel. It was all on account of a signorina, they protested, and they had rather persuaded Mrs. Duncan that the girl was Ethel. There had been such a scene, with dark eyes flashing, and white teeth gnashing, and Ethel and her mother enjoying it to the full.

  But the sequel had not been quite so pleasant. They had kept this to themselves, only telling it to their own advantage. The first gentleman had not been a duke at all, he had been the professional dancer who danced at tea dances. He had had an affair which had been more than indiscreet, with a chambermaid in the hotel. She had been the young woman in question, and not Ethel at all. The second young man had been the booking-clerk. He had been dismissed, and now he had found that his girl, also the chambermaid, had loved not wisely but too well. ‘’Ell’ the booking-clerk had reiterated, ‘I gif you ’ell.’

  The story as told by Mrs. Duncan in the dining-saloon was not quite the same. She omitted the chambermaid, and she preferred to think of Ethel as the young woman who had caused the ’ell which the ex-booking-clerk had most successfully made of the dance-room.

  Fergus listening, read through it. He knew Italians of old, he understood Neapolitans. Fair hair be damned for a tale. It would want something more than fair hair to turn their heads. Would the cruise never end? he asked himself. All these dreadful people! Until you started cruising you did not know that such dreadful people existed. Only the previous night he had watched an old man from the North of England, who had solemnly partaken of both sorts of soup! He was, he had explained to the steward, ‘a rare one for broth’!

  There were the romantic people who suffered their romances outside Fergus’s cabin night after night, when he was aching for sleep. There was that little fool the A. P. who had picked up a peroxide blonde, with an over red mouth, and he was making an arrant ass of himself. ‘One of these days,’ thought Fergus, ‘he’ll get the purser after him,’ and the wish was father to the thought.

  But the purser wasn’t that sort. He was a much older man, and he had seen young officers get into messes before, and out of them again, and do the same thing next trip and never suffer too much for it.

  He knew life, did the purser, he knew it very well, and was quite content to live and to let live.

  But Fergus was in that mood when he hated al
l the world and all the people in the world, save perhaps Ann. She reminded him of a butterfly (trite, that, perhaps), something gradually developing, an exquisite and unsuspected beauty emanating from an unpromising shell. And once he had thought of her as an old trout! Inconceivable. At Tilbury she had been so ordinary, one of a hundred other unmarried women over thirty, who see the romantic adventure left behind them, and take on the drab and monotonous outlook which stamps them.

  To-night she wore soft blue chiffon. She was a new creature, he thought, and mentally she had changed too. She was thinking now. She had not been thinking when she had come on board. Perhaps a touch of romance had come into his life. Perhaps he also was suffering his sentimental twinge.

  Life at sea is so strange.

  IV

  It was late, much later.

  From B deck where they were dancing there came the irresistible melody of ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, haunting, reproachful, like a memory.

  Ann was standing there in the golden path that the moonlight made across the water. Very faintly the ship sighed, though there was nothing in the gentle lapping of the water to cause her anguish. The sea was like a pool, a sweetly pale pool of delicate turquoise, and here or there it seemed as though a needle of gold thread had been run through it by a fairy hand. It was the exquisite artistry of the moonlight.

  Ann stood there, her elbows resting on the taffrail. Her hands cupped her chin, and the fairy thread ran through her hair in little filaments of gold where the moon itself touched her. There is something in this, she told herself, that the people ashore must inevitably miss, that golden stream which comes so near, but never near enough to receive them into its beauty.

  That was how Oliver found her.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what are you thinking of?’

  ‘I was thinking if only this could go on for ever, this gay adventure, this romance, the joy. Only it can’t. I’ve got to go back to South Kensington.’

  South Kensington with the big strong plane trees in Queen’s Gate, green and fresh in spring with the wide rounded road rising in between their avenue; old and sooty in autumn, stark in winter. South Kensington with the paper-sellers grouped together in the arcade, with the vividly coloured fruit shop at the corner, and the faint hot rubber scent of the Tube, and the hustle of the ‘Met’, and sometimes the intangible perfume of joss-sticks from the Chinese shop at the end. South Kensington, all very simple, rather unflurried and dignified, what you might have called a very ‘nice quarter to live in’. All respectability and quiet gentility, and very little else.

  She hated the idea of going back to it.

  It is so difficult when you have tasted something much sweeter, essence of lilies blowing under the cedars of the Alameda, gold of the Virgin who guards the sailors passing in and out of the harbour, unruffled loveliness of the dead city under the hill, lulled into long sleeping by the treacherous arm of that devil Vesuvius.

  The return would be ghastly, and now she knew it.

  ‘But why go back?’ he asked.

  ‘Because it is my job. I haven’t the money to continue like this, and London is my home.’

  ‘No, London is where you have happened to live! It isn’t your home. You don’t love South Kensington or Balham?’

  ‘I don’t love them, but they are home.’

  ‘You’re a little mole blinding yourself. Well, I’m going to make you see. I’m going to make you see for your own good. Why go back to South Kensington when you can go on touring the world?’

  ‘But I can’t.’

  Magic of the moonlight, craziness of the fairy who had threaded the pale blue water with gold. She felt herself quiver. She wanted to go from one beautiful place to another. From Vesuvius dark and glowering, with the faint phantasmal tulle of smoke about its crater, and the red passionate glow of fire every little while. From Vesuvius to Stromboli, just as dark, just as glowering, with the eternal cloud lying above it, as though it were too tired to drift away. She wanted to go on for ever. ‘Only it can’t be,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, it can. I am a nomad, a wanderer. I never stay long anywhere. I go on and on, why not come with me?’

  ‘But you don’t have to work for your living. I do.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m a free man now. I’m no longer married. Don’t you understand?’

  She stood there dazed for a moment, dazed by the suddenness of it all, and the turn that her life had taken. She had never had the chance of marriage before. She was thirty-five, and she had never known love or the opportunities of love, she had never seen the passionate attachment of it all. Now, suddenly in the golden filament of that almost too lovely moon, chance swung wide its doors upon her life. She saw the might-have-beens and the will-be’s all dazzling together. She said, ‘But you cannot possibly love me?’

  ‘Perhaps not yet, but I am keenly interested in you. I believe that it would be a success.’

  ‘But people only marry for love?’

  ‘Nonsense! Affection is a more stable basis, it lasts longer.’

  She felt his hand slipped into her arm, and stood there conscious that it was the first time she had felt the curious rapture of being touched in that way. She felt the passionate desire for something the years had not given her. Then she remembered Lilia. It was just as though the ghost of Lilia, cold and clammy, walked down the golden path of the moonlight, bitterly aloof.

  ‘But Lilia died only yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘She died to me a great many yesterdays ago.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. How dreadful we are! How dare we stand here talking like this when she is hardly cold?’

  She was shaking a little, ashamed of herself, ashamed of him too. He caught her wrists in his hands, holding them firmly. ‘You’re a little goose, Ann, it isn’t dreadful at all. I’ve been a widower all these years really.’

  ‘But not really,’ she told him. ‘I oughtn’t to have let you say that to me.’

  ‘Oh yes, you ought. You have blinded yourself to life, and to everything that lay outside your narrow little rut, and for the first time you are seeing things in their right perspective. Their attraction has got you. You won’t be able to give them up again. You only think you will, but you won’t when it comes to it.’

  She knew that he was speaking the truth, and she was afraid of it.

  ‘If you don’t marry me now, Ann, you will later. When you sent me that caviare to my cabin, I knew that you would come to me.’

  ‘I oughtn’t to have sent that. I oughtn’t to have done it. I knew that the moment I saw the steward’s face.’

  ‘But you did it; all the same you did it. That showed me what I wanted to know.’

  From the distance there came the faint frolic of the band ‒ ‘A life on the ocean wave’. Then they were indulging in a Paul Jones. They could hear the faint slurring of feet as old gentlemen galloped and young gentlemen chassé-ed. They could hear it above the gentle crushing of the water as the giant bows of the ship ploughed through the turquoise paleness.

  She asked, ‘Where is it going to end?’

  He made a little gesture as though to draw her closer. ‘Here, on my heart!’

  She broke away, running down the three decks to her cabin in a panic. She was afraid to look at him, afraid to stay. She flung herself on the bed, and found that she was crying, He must not talk to her like this; with Lilia only just dead, it was disgraceful. She must stop it, but how? How?

  She wasn’t sure that the tears were not of joy.

  V

  Oliver did not attempt to follow Ann. He brought out a gold cigarette-case and lit a cigarette automatically. He stared into the round wise eye of the moon all the time. He was forty.

  He also had thought that life lay behind him, though never in quite the same way as it lies behind a woman. Nature does not curtail a man’s love years in the same manner; it gives him the opportunity to love and to be loved even though the sands of time are running out for him. He had been a difficult child, orphaned young
, and brought up by a series of relations, none of whom had wanted him, but who had wanted very much the allowance that went with him.

  His early life was allotted and partitioned into niches, influenced by the relatives under whose care he had happened to find himself at that particular time. The Banks side of the family had been common. The Montgomerie side grand. Helen Montgomerie, his mother, had stooped to love a man much beneath her in position. At first the Bankses had taken in the child, who had carried with him Helen Montgomerie’s fortune.

  There had been Uncle Alfred, large and fat with a very definite attachment to check trousers and to strange headgear. Uncle Alfred in private life kept a little ‘public’ on the Portsmouth Road. In his spare time, he was a student of form, both on the turf and on the stage. He had a very eloquent understanding of a lady’s legs and of a filly’s capacity. When his nephew stayed at the Britannia, his life was spent in the intimate acquaintance of a beer engine, and of those friends of Uncle Alfred’s designated as ‘sports’. They were chiefly gentlemen with husky voices and loud ties and a pretty taste in fancy boots.

  As a child Oliver had rather liked being with Uncle Alfred, who was noisy, but cheerful, and generous in the extreme; certainly Oliver had liked it better than being with the other Banks relations, dear Grandma and Auntie Miggs.

  Dear Grandma and Auntie Miggs lived in a villa at Finsbury Park, and everything was most select. Auntie Miggs was the only one of the family who had never married, and she stayed on to keep house for ‘poor Ma’. As a point of fact poor Ma was a great deal poorer for having Auntie Miggs with her; the old lady was frightened to death of her unmarried daughter, who insisted on having everything her own way, and protested that it was always for ‘poor Ma’s good’.

  Everything in Laurel Lodge was polished and cleaned to such a degree that it made life a dangerously disagreeable adventure. It was full of ‘mustn’ts’ for little boys, very different from the hail-fellow-well-met atmosphere of the Britannia public on the Portsmouth Road.

  At Laurel Lodge everything went by rule of thumb and according to Auntie Miggs, who ordered what was and what was not. Everybody was afraid of her. Oliver was afraid of her too, little and insignificant as she might be; in his heart he always despised Grandma for having let Auntie Miggs get out of hand, Auntie who so obviously wanted slapping.