Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  As they crossed the square, she said, ‘I haven’t much money and it mustn’t be anywhere expensive.’

  ‘I wasn’t taking you anywhere too grand. This place is moderate. It is the sort of place a lady can stay at. You see, this isn’t like home, you can’t go just anywhere.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  She had an uneasy longing for the cabin on board, which had become home to her. She had a homesick cleaving to her steward; she would have given a lot to see Miss Brown coming towards her now, or even those dreadful Duncans, or the Spinkses, in fact anybody who was even remotely connected with the ship.

  Mr. Harding was escorting her through the strangest little back alleys. ‘Having no streets makes it seem a funny sort of place,’ he said. ‘I’ve never thought much of it myself, a jumble of old buildings, nothing up to date, and I don’t believe the canals are sanitary, they smell dreadful in the summer.’

  ‘Oh, but the atmosphere,’ said Ann.

  ‘That doesn’t impress me much. A good place for a honeymoon, I suppose?’ He gave her a quick glance.

  Mr. Harding had been living a strictly chaste life ever since he arrived in Venice, and for a moment he was wondering whether the misadventure of the Allando might not have provided him with the opportunity for which he had been longing. She was pretty enough, in a shy sort of way, a bit prim perhaps, and all alone too. Ann did not take the hint for the simple reason that she never saw it.

  She said, ‘It must be a marvellous place for a honeymoon, and the Serenata too.’

  Secretly Mr. Harding did not think too much of the Serenata. A bit gloomy, he thought. He liked the Victoria Palace, you could get a good laugh out of the Victoria Palace, especially when somebody really good like Nellie Wallace was there, and you’d come away feeling all the better for it. The Serenata had never affected him in that way. Still, he thought that if this was her line, he had better play up to it.

  ‘What about going to the Serenata to-night?’ he enquired. ‘I’ve got nothing on after the office closes. There is precious little for me to do in Venice. It isn’t like Golders Green, you know.’

  ‘No, of course it isn’t.’

  They turned down a thin alley with high houses shutting it in on either side. She began to feel a little frightened.

  ‘Are you sure this is right?’ she asked nervously.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ and he pointed ahead to the hotel entrance, where the Grand Canal lay gleaming in the twilight, with the hotel door on the left of it, lit by a blaze of electric light. It seemed so funny that none of these places had got proper front doors. Why, even the Luna had to be approached in a tiny passageway, nothing like as wide as those which she sometimes used as a short cut from St. Martin’s Lane through to Leicester Square. She saw the hotel.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she agreed, and felt rather embarrassed at having doubted his intentions. A little while ago she would never even have thought of such a thing; it was the cruise. Cuthbert had been quite right. People who went cruising got affected by cruising, they were never quite the same again. Not quite.

  They went in at the door, and she saw the enquiry office, and a lounge full of people which opened on to the canal itself. Mr. Harding approached the office, and entered into a long and entirely incomprehensible conversation with a gentleman in blue uniform with many brass buttons displayed on his large chest. The upshot of the conversation, which was accompanied by gestures which at one time Ann had thought were threatening, appeared to be entirely satisfactory.

  ‘I’ve fixed it up,’ said Mr. Harding, ‘a small room, but you said that you wanted it done cheap; I’ll call for you at nine, and we will have a spot of music and make the arrangements for going to see the Consul in the morning.’

  Ann felt very grateful and she wanted to express her gratitude, but here words failed her.

  ‘Oh well, so long for the present,’ said Mr. Harding airily, and he went away.

  Solemnly Ann was escorted to her room by the lift boy.

  II

  Ann did not like Mr. Harding. In fact she knew that she quite actively disliked him, but because he was the only person whom she knew in Venice, she clung to him desperately. Without him she would be lost. He had been very kind and he had fixed her up for the night. It was perhaps unkind not to like him.

  She had no luggage; she had not even got a nightdress, and to Ann there was something almost disgusting in not having a nightdress. She tidied her hair as best she could, washed her hands ‒ really, she would have to buy some soap, and a sponge and a toothbrush ‒ yet she could not bring herself to go inside these queer foreign shops. What should she do?

  It seemed so dreadful to be robbed of everything one possessed, save just the jumbled contents of one small handbag. If only she could have guessed at the freakish whim of fate this morning, and have sent some of her things ashore! If …! The immediate need was very urgent.

  She opened her room door and tried to find her way downstairs. She went cautiously, for Ann was extremely suspicious of foreign hotels. She could believe anything of them.

  On the second floor she ran into a middle-aged woman who was coming out of her bedroom.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said the middle-aged woman brightly. Instantly they recognized each other as being English. They started to talk. They went down together.

  In the light, Ann could see that her new friend was tall and svelte, that she was amazingly well preserved. Although her hair was a lightish grey, she had the supple figure of a girl, and the tender apple-blossom complexion. Her eyes, brown and appealing, were not surrounded by wrinkles. It was a young face.

  ‘You are staying here alone?’ she asked Ann. ‘Or have you got your husband with you?’

  ‘Oh no. I’m not married. I’m part of a cruise that has gone on without me.’

  ‘You don’t mean they have left you behind?’

  ‘I do mean that,’ said Ann simply; ‘it’s dreadful, but it is true. I haven’t even got as much as a toothbrush, and I want to go out and buy one, only I daren’t.’

  ‘Nonsense. I’ll come with you. There is a chemist at the top of the alley. Come along, he may be shut after dinner.’

  ‘It’s awfully good of you …’

  ‘Heavens no, you’d do the same for me.’

  As they went to the shop they chatted. The new friend was an artist and she gave the name of Eva Temple. She had been staying in Venice to paint it, and she was going on to stay at a little inn she knew of in the Dolomites the next evening. Ann in return gave her the briefest description of herself. A typist. A very ordinary typist who had never been abroad before, and now this had happened to her.

  ‘I always think everything happens for the best,’ said Mrs. Temple. ‘I even said that when my husband ran away from me with a little chit of nineteen …’

  ‘But how can this be for the best? What about my luggage?’

  ‘Oh, they’ll be sure to send that home for you.’

  Ann could have wept. ‘You don’t understand; it isn’t that sort of luggage. None of them could be any possible use to me at home. They are the things that I bought in Marseilles. Things that are not really me.’ Then she choked back the words. After all, why should she start telling a stranger about all this? The thing was done; nobody else would understand.

  The shopping was far easier than she had expected, for the chemist spoke the most excellent English, far more perfectly than Ann did herself, and was most willing to oblige. A sponge, toothbrush and paste, soap, and a small wooden-backed hairbrush were bought. It meant parting with more of the precious lire, but she could not help it. These things were necessary. Eva Temple suggested a nightdress, and they crossed to quite a humble little lingerie shop. It was not of the kind that flourish in Venice, but something far simpler; for all that it seemed to Ann that the plain nightdress cost more than it would have done in England. The little wad of notes was depleting too rapidly to be assuring. She must not spend a penny more than was actually necessary, she rem
inded herself, and she returned in a most subdued frame of mind.

  ‘But it was good of you to take me,’ she told Mrs. Temple. ‘We might perhaps dine together? I am sure that the waiter will put you at my table if I ask him.’

  ‘Yes, let’s.’

  Ann ran upstairs to put her purchases away, and then returned to the dining-room. She felt nervous. The waiters were obsequious; on the small tables were golden baskets of fruit, the small black Italian grapes, oranges, mandarinos, the wizened-up apples that are so prevalent abroad. In the centre of the room hung an enormous chandelier, glittering with lights. It was an alien setting, and again Ann felt a yearning for the ship. She was glad for the friendship of Eva Temple, for the shelter of her presence and for being able to sit at her table. She noticed her new friend more closely. Perhaps Eva’s eyes read more deeply into hearts than most people’s. Her nostrils were finely cut. Her mouth was sensitive and whimsical. Gradually, bit by bit, Eva won Ann’s story from her. She had decided on that from the first, for Eva made it her business to learn from other people. They interested her, until she had pecked the flesh from their bones, figuratively speaking; then, when they represented nothing more than an empty husk to her, she lost her attention.

  Ann told her of the early days. South Kensington, Balham, Balham, South Kensington, with occasional interspersings of Henrietta Street. In return Eva told her a little of her own life, a life so strangely different that it read like a book. Eva had been born with the nomadic soul; she could not rest long in one place; she was a wanderer, she for ever pitched her tent from place to place. She picked the world bare, as she picked people’s minds bare, and then she left it. Somewhere in Cheyne Walk she had a little studio, that was if it hadn’t been already pulled down, for the place had been condemned for years. It was a little studio overlooking the river, pearl in summer, pale blue in spring, blue and grey and unutterably lovely in autumn and winter. She had had pictures in the Academy, and in the Salon. She had had what the world may call success, but it had not satisfied her. For the heart of Eva Temple was the heart of all creative genius; it does not want what the world can give it. Her manna was of heaven.

  She had married, and they had not got on. He had not understood her; he was a rich stockbroker, she said, and he had the Stock Exchange mind. That conveyed nothing to Ann. Then he had gone off with a mere chit of a child, and perhaps the proud soul of Eva had been hurt, bruised a little. She had not wanted him herself, but she certainly had not wanted somebody else to have him. And a child too. Well, she had told herself at the time, they would never get on. Herbert wasn’t that sort. Herbert liked comfort. He liked home well kept, and a lovely wife. He had got neither.

  ‘It didn’t worry me,’ she lied to Ann. ‘I don’t suppose I ever gave him a second thought. The divorce went through and that was that. I don’t know even if he has married her.’

  But that was a lie too. She had taken good care to know. She had been staying outside Rome at the time, when the spring was turning the hills to pink with almond blossom. The Apennines were hazy with blue veils drawn about them. The news had come to her in an English paper, nearly a week old, brought up to her bedroom by a frowsty-looking chamber-man. There had been a picture of Herbert leaving the registry office, and a ridiculous caption; the girl had looked very young, and very childish, and Herbert had looked smug. She had noted with an evil appreciation that his coat was beginning to fit tightly at the waist ‒ too tightly ‒ he’d have to watch that!

  There had been a few bad days, when she had not cared what she did. In the hotel they had shrugged their shoulders, for nothing suited the Signora. Then she had buried her love. She did not care. She told everybody she did not care, and now she was almost beginning to believe the lie herself.

  Ann listened to it all. She felt herself growing more and more the new self. She was actually talking to a woman who had employed divorce to free herself of an irksome husband. That in itself was polluting. But somehow now she could not think of it polluting quite so much.

  After dinner they went on to the veranda, and sat there on the very edge of the canal drinking their coffee. The lights from the Serenata were reflected in mid-stream on the water, rippled in places. It was all very quiet, very enchanting. It seemed as though time stood still for them, the future did not matter so much.

  ‘In the morning,’ said Eva, ‘I will come with you to see the Consul. He is a personal friend of mine, and I am sure he will do something to help you.’

  ‘You’re very good.’ Then her voice faltered.

  ‘Why, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Don’t you see I don’t want to go home? I don’t want to go back to South Kensington and the toil of Henrietta Street. I don’t want to be my old self again.’

  Eva eyed her. She was interesting. On the spur of the moment she said, ‘Then why on earth don’t you come on with me to the Dolomites for a while?’

  ‘Because I’m stranded. I’ve got practically nothing in the world save a brand new toothbrush and a sponge. I’ve got a few lire, just the few that beast of a gondolier left me, and the money that Fifinelle returned. That’s all.’

  ‘But the Allando won’t keep your things. They can’t. We will cable on to them in the morning to return them. They’ll send them to my inn. It’s cheap there, and you could stay months for practically nothing. Has the purser got your money?’

  ‘Some of it. I left a deposit with him.’

  ‘Was it much?’

  ‘It seemed a terrible lot to me. I don’t suppose you’d call it much. There must be at least thirty pounds there.’’

  ‘They shall cable it from Ragusa.’

  The spirit of adventure suddenly seized Ann in deadly earnest and she turned to Mrs. Temple. ‘But where are you going, and could I really come? I’d wire home for the rest of my money to be sent out to me. I put a hundred and twenty-five aside to be invested for my old age …’

  Eva laughed. ‘You would! My dear, old age never comes. Who was it wrote “Yesterday is dead, forget it! To-morrow is not here, forgo it! Now is the time that matters”?’

  Just what the old woman in the Alameda had said, only differently. Ann felt that she would do anything to postpone going back to the ineffable boredom and monotony of life. One hundred and twenty-five pounds invested would bring in a very modest six pounds a year if she were lucky, and she wasn’t usually lucky over things. She could claim six pounds a year’s worth of fun from it, and cram it all into the next few months. She was not due home for another fortnight. Perhaps Mr. Robert would understand, and take her back in the autumn, any time ahead, only not now … she could not go back now …

  She saw Venice rising out of the night, a lovely frail cluster of flowers, her domes and colonnades like lilies, white and shadowy against the haze of the canal. From the boats anchored in the middle of the lagoon there came the first quiver of the music. It was Pagliacci.

  A much-buttoned pageboy brought her a card on a brass tray.

  ‘Mr. Harding is waiting in a gondola, signorina,’ he said.

  III

  They were rowed across the canal.

  Now the spirit of all mysterious adventure took shape. It might be very different from last night, when Oliver had been with her, less tender, less provocative, and she had to admit that deep down in her heart she had certain qualms about Mr. Harding with his little ginger moustache and pale blue eyes, and his best Golders Green style. There was something about him that was not entirely inducive of being at your ease. For all this it was adventure, and as such Ann loved it.

  ‘I always think the music is a bit slow,’ said Mr. Harding. ‘I’m keen on jazz myself. Something that has a little pep in it.’

  Ann, trying to enter into the spirit of the thing to oblige, suggested ‘Auf Wiedersehen’. It was a melody linked up with the memories of the ship; the dancing on B deck. Taffrail conversations. Drifting in a haze. Sea-fever.

  ‘No, I think that is a bit too slow. Too dreamy. I like a tune wit
h some go in it. There isn’t any go in what they are singing now.’

  It was the love song of the passionate Neapolitan at his lady’s window. ‘But it’s delicious,’ she said.

  The gondolier attached their boat to the long trail of gondolas beside the one which contained the Serenata. She could not help comparing the difference between this and the London theatres. Here late-comers made no hustle, no confusion, no noise. Gondolas glided into position, with only the ceaseless ripple on the water, so slight, so evasive that it might have been but the gentle breathing of the lagoon itself. But then Venice will not be hustled. Even an invasion of Americans had failed to bustle the city of romance. It was still a ghost town, reflected in the blueness of its waters; it was still a phantom that time did not touch.

  While one of the men was singing, Ann was aware that Mr. Harding was watching her very carefully. She turned abruptly to him, vaguely uncomfortable.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘what is it?’

  ‘I was thinking how good it was to be out with an English girl again after all these dago misses.’

  Girl! He thought her a girl! Prudish though she might be, it brought a pleasant thrill to her heart, a new warmth to her lips and cheeks. ‘It’s nice of you, Mr. Harding,’ she said.

  ‘Rot! It’s nice of you to come out with me, and please don’t call me Mr. Harding; my name is Cyril.’

  She could think of nothing to say, save, ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes, what’s yours?’

  She did not want to tell him, yet she could not think of a reasonable excuse for refusing. She said as coldly as she could, ‘It’s Ann, but very few people call me that,’ and she added the last as a sop to her reserve, for it was quite untrue that she had been called anything but Ann.