Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

‘You can’t expect me to stop.’

  ‘But, Ann, why do you go away? Do you run away from me? Is it that you are afraid?’

  It was the truth but she denied it. Suddenly he put his arm around her, and drew her to him. She wanted to resist but she could not, he was so strong. She just cried. Ann had never wept on any man’s shoulder before, and it was a beautiful experience. Now she felt that she did not care what he had done, most probably it was the chit’s fault anyway, and she would forgive him. Like this she would forgive him anything. Pablo kissed her. He kissed her hair, whispering soft and tender phrases in a consoling German; her eyelids, her cheeks, and at last her mouth. And, as she told herself afterwards, the awful part was that she did not attempt to stop him. She liked it. She would have given anything for more. It was just as though she were putty in his hands, and he could mould her into any shape, and do what he would with her.

  ‘That girl she mean nothing to me,’ he persisted, ‘she was all experience, all knowledge. But you are simple. You are all virgin.’

  She wished that he would not say such things, and in particular that he would not use that word.

  ‘You not go? You stay? Promise me you not go?’

  ‘There is no point in my staying.’

  He made a last daring suggestion. ‘But what if we marry?’

  She could not believe the full significance of the words, but stood there staring at him, with the golden spears of sunshine piercing through the dark trees, with the up-rushing essence of earth scent and Tannenbaum, with the day rising above them. Then suddenly, only half understanding, she broke from him and ran out of the forest back to the inn.

  If we marry!

  And she would marry him; she knew that. She could not stop herself. It was all very well of people preaching, all very well for them to become common sense about it, but she could not help herself. The curious atmosphere of attraction had got her in its control. She felt much like a fish caught in a net, flapping and struggling through the meshes. Such a marriage could only bring disaster, surely last night had shown her that? Yet she knew that she had not sufficient sense left to reason that way.

  Eva had been quite right when she had described Pablo as being a nasty physical young man who looked like a cheap musical comedy thrill. Only unfortunately none of these things helped Ann to see sense; she felt that she never would again. ‘If I’m not careful, I’m going to make an awful mess of my life,’ she told herself, ‘and I just can’t be careful.’

  For here she was in her own room, offering quite good and plausible excuses to herself as to why she should not leave the place. There would be such complications about her luggage, and it would probably end in her losing it altogether, and she did not want to do that. Whereas if she waited a few days it would be bound to come. There would be difficulty over the money the purser was sending. She had no reason for going, and Eva would think her mad, or guess the real reason, which would be even more trying. On the other hand in a few days a letter from home could explain the whole thing. An illness there ‒ preferably appendicitis, which she always felt was such a convenient illness ‒ or domestic business. She told herself that she could not possibly go to-day.

  Sophie brought up coffee and rolls. She set the tray down and departed. Outside there was a banging of doors, and a chattering of keys. The keys to all the rooms were large and cumbersome, and hung on a key rack behind the screen marked Bureau on an old box-lid. There was the sound of heavy luggage being pulled about, and calls for Andreas. Andreas acted as out-porter and boot-boy and kitchen lad, and quite often understudy to mein Herr in more intimate matters than mein Herr dreamt of. Andreas, in a green baize apron, was hauling luggage about, and the old tin car from the village was waiting at the door. Andreas and the boy who drove the car entered into a bright conversation. Good business, commented Andreas, guests coming, guests going. Much good business.

  Herbert came out first. It had cost him the three-carat diamond from Vienna, and God alone knew where he would be able to raise the money for it, but he had got to do something to get away. Ann went on to the balcony to watch. Herbert was crestfallen and rather subdued, and he was followed by the chit who was far from subdued.

  ‘I hated this beastly place,’ she was saying, ‘if it hadn’t been for you wanting to see that wife of yours …’

  Herbert made vague and quite useless gestures of expostulation. They climbed into the car.

  And as Ann watched, she heard a new sound. It was a strangely disturbing sound, coming as it did into the stillness of the forest. A second tin motor-car was struggling up the mountain road, pulling badly, and wheezing as she came. She rounded the corner and clattered on to the open space where already the first tin car was loading up.

  The idea of two cars where one alone was even a rarity horrified Andreas so much that he dropped the chit’s dressing-case and it rolled down the steps.

  ‘Here, I say,’ called the chit pleasantly to Herbert, ‘look what that bloody boy’s been and gone and done.’

  But no one noticed her.

  Out of the second car a man descended. He was indicating a trunk which was stuck in the back. Ann’s eye became fastened on the trunk; she could not move her gaze. She recognized the trunk as having been bought at Messrs. John Barker’s, one of their famous family of nineteen-and-sixpennies, initials extra. And there were Ann’s initials added at small cost but carrying with them, so she had felt at the time, the hallmark of distinction.

  ‘My luggage!’ she gasped aloud to no one.

  There was in fact nobody to hear.

  And the man was Oliver Banks.

  Chapter 4

  I

  Ann went inside her room and she closed the windows and stood there, her hands still on the latchet, holding fast. She supposed there had never been a moment in her whole life when she had been more glad to see anybody. She was almost afraid because she was so glad. It seemed obvious that Oliver must have left the ship at Ragusa, and taking her luggage had brought it all the way for her. She did not know what to do, nor what to think.

  She stood there, quite still, and all the little impressions of the room were grafted into her mind. The slender bed, the simple dressing-table, with its bouffante skirts of chintz; the icon hung in the corner, the dreadful garish pictures.

  Outside the first tin car chuffed away, and the shrill voice of the chit attacking the unprotected Herbert faded into distance. Presently there was a knock at the door, and Andreas came in bearing Mr. John Barker’s nineteen-and-sixpenny trunk on his back. He let it down with a crash which should have broken every bottle inside it, but Ann was so grateful at seeing it that she never even thought of rebuking Andreas.

  ‘Mein Herr for you to see,’ said Andreas with some difficulty. He was not fluent with English.

  ‘I’ll come down. I won’t be long, tell him.’

  For in Ann was the urgent longing to unpack. She was so dead sick of the pink linen frock, and the grey flannel suit which was so desperately hot. She undid the box and opened it. Miss Brown had obviously been called in to do the packing, and she had done it splendidly. She had employed a great deal of tissue paper and padding, which was a nuisance, as every bit had to be carefully unwrapped in case it concealed some bottle or jar. One by one Ann drew out her things. Another hat. The white frock with the little madonna-blue cape in that heavenly shade. She felt that she must put it on at once, for she was sure that she should be sick if she had to go on wearing the same old things. New shoes. A crisp clean petticoat. In them she felt that she herself was a new woman.

  It was Eva who came in to see her.

  ‘Well, that’s got rid of Herbert. I never heard such impertinence as his bringing that awful woman here. What could he have been thinking of? Oh, has your luggage come? Very quick, surely?’

  ‘A friend brought it from the ship.’

  ‘A friend?’ Eva looked at her queerly. ‘That’s odd, isn’t it? You’ve lost no time, I see.’

  Ann shook her hea
d.

  ‘I am so dead sick of the old things. I think I shall never be able to look a piece of pink linen in the face again.’

  And in this frock she felt like a new woman, just as though she had flung away an old self with that crushed dress on the floor. Now she would be able to start the journey home. For she must go back while she still had got the strength left. She must not let herself be swayed by Pablo. He was not a good influence. With him anything was possible, or nothing. Now that Oliver was here, he was older and more stable ‒ although he had once told her that nothing held him and that he was nomad through and through ‒ but if she could only bring herself to tell him about Pablo, he would take her to Bolzano or Innsbruck and he would put her on the train for England and for safety. For the clatter of the typewriters in Henrietta Street, and the cheerless English summer, its hot days marred by thunderstorms, its cold days soaked with dismal rain.

  Such fun the English summer after Italy, and the Dolomites, and all the exquisite beauty of dawn rosying the mountains. Such fun, she told herself, and pulled a wry face.

  And now as she went on to the landing she was not so sure that it was going to be easy meeting Oliver. She felt self-conscious, and wondered how she should start … ‘So good of you to have brought my trunk’ (it sounded most insincere). ‘Have you had a rotten journey?’ (far too trivial; after all, he had done a lot for her coming all this way). She went downstairs resignedly.

  Half way she met Pablo.

  ‘Oh, but how divine, like a little sweet madonna,’ said Pablo, and his hand was laid arrestingly on hers; ‘we go and sit out of doors and drink in poetry, ya?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t. A friend of mine has just come.’

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘Yes, from the ship.’

  A cloud drifted across his face; she saw him turning sulky, darkening.

  ‘I do not like much your friends,’ he said.

  ‘I did not like much your friend,’ she agreed, and she went on, leaving him standing there.

  It took courage to do that, but she did it.

  In the salon Oliver Banks was eating the most enormous breakfast she had ever seen.

  II

  ‘Ann!’

  ‘Oh, it was good of you to come all this way and to bring that trunk. It was awfully good of you …’

  ‘Well, you would not have got it for ages. Directly I discovered what had happened I went to the purser. He was awfully decent about it, and he said I could bring it along. Ann, whatever made you lose the ship like that? What happened?’

  ‘It was the gondolier. We were going to Murano, and he just would not hurry. He kept on wanting more money.’

  ‘The dirty skunk! You can never trust those old Ities, they are always doing something like that. I suppose he was not bothered when you missed the ship?’

  ‘Not in the least.’ Now she could afford to laugh at the gondolier’s lack of interest, though at the time it had been a veritable tragedy. ‘I went straight to Bunt’s, and luckily there was the money there from Fifinelle’s. I saw the Consul and I met Eva. She suggested that we should come along here to this inn.’

  ‘It is a very charming spot. A little lonely, out of the way spot. Nobody ever finds it, I imagine. Nothing ever happens here.’

  ‘Oh, doesn’t it?’ and she laughed.

  She met his eyes across the enormous plate of bacon and eggs, and somehow she went off into schoolgirlish sniggers. Nothing ever happened here! Nobody ever came here! Why, things had been happening from the very moment that she had arrived, and they were going on happening. More happened here than in Piccadilly Circus, or perhaps you came closer to it, more face to face, as it were.

  ‘How did you persuade mein Herr to give you all that?’ she demanded. For mein Herr had a rooted preference for the Continental breakfast; it was less trouble. He always said that the English ate too much, rolls and coffee were better, so much healthier, and the idea of anybody having persuaded him to venture on bacon and eggs was almost miraculous.

  ‘I told him I’d got to have it,’ said Oliver, ‘after that journey I was feeling pretty deathly. And Bolzano, I got there in the dead of the night. What a place!’

  ‘The ancient fountains …’ said Ann mischievously, quoting Monsieur Heriot.

  ‘Not much use to a bona fide traveller in the dead of night.’

  ‘The arcades.’

  ‘Equally futile. I came on to a little one-eyed place in another train ‒ not a rapide ‒ God knows what it was, and then I got a funicular, and after that the most broken-down old car God ever made.’

  ‘I saw it.’

  ‘I’d got to get here somehow, and nowhere had they heard of food. When I left the rapide and got into this region of the Dolomites or the Tyrol or whatever it is, the restaurant cars and the sleepers left me. When I tried to get breakfast at one place they offered me café-au-lait in a cardboard carton, the same kind you buy jelly in at Harrod’s food department.’

  ‘I expect you were ravenously hungry.’

  ‘Ravenously, and I told mein Herr. He made no bones about it.’

  ‘It was good of you coming all this way, and for me …’

  Oliver swallowed a mouthful of bacon and egg. ‘It was for you that I came. Otherwise wild horses wouldn’t have got me here.’

  Ann felt that she ought to say something, to be polite, to thank him for the compliment, only she couldn’t. ‘Now I’ve got my luggage I am going home,’ she told him.

  ‘Money run out?’

  ‘No,’ and then she told the truth, and it was bitter and cruel and it hurt, ‘sense has run out, I think,’ she said.

  III

  Oliver did not pursue the subject then. There were several interruptions. Eva came down armed with all the painting apparatus, and prepared to march off back to yesterday’s scene of operations. She had to be introduced and to make her adieux in one and the same breath. She would not be back until evening, when it grew too dark and the light changed, and she would be taking Madame Heriot with her. Madame Heriot was all smiles too. Her picture was coming out very well. She had even dropped a few hints to Eva as to how to do this or that, and they had been received with surprising coldness. Eva did not want Madame Heriot’s hints. She hated modern art and could not see which way up the picture was supposed to hang; that was if any particular way up mattered, for it looked the same either way.

  Then Pablo appeared. Oliver gave Pablo one glance and then looked away. Ann had the horrid idea that he also had formed Eva’s opinion of Pablo looking like a cheap musical comedy thrill. Well, perhaps he did. They might be right, only in spite of all that he attracted her. He attracted her all the same.

  The strained conversation was at its worst when mein Herr rushed in exclaiming, ‘Der Postbote,’ and indicating that there was money to be paid on a letter obviously from Cuthbert.

  Cuthbert took great exception to the imposition of foreign postage. He considered that it was a great deal too expensive, and he for one could not afford to pay it. Ann was rich, and therefore he put on a stamp of the value which he considered was just and reasonable, and she must pay the other end. Ann had been paying all the time, and she was heartily sick of it.

  Also the contents of his letters were not worth paying for And this one was dear at any price.

  He was as usual scandalized, and he implored Ann to come home. Eleanor was not well. Gloria was thinking of taking on a job. She was attending a course of secretarial work, and she hoped to qualify at the end of six months, but at the moment she found the speed at shorthand most baffling. It was highly necessary for Gloria to earn. Cuthbert emphasized this point, ‘highly necessary’ was underlined several times. All the sources from which she had had expectations had failed her. By this, Ann gathered, he referred to the insurance money and the three hundred pounds that Ann had won and had spent on herself in riotous living.

  Poor girl! It was all very sad.

  Ann could not see that it was any sadder for Gloria to hav
e to earn her living than it had been for her. She folded the letter and she put it away into her bag.

  To go back to that. To go back to routine, to greyness, and the sure and certain knowledge that nothing could ever break the drabness through again. For luck does not hold to that extent. You don’t win two sweepstakes in your life. You don’t go cruising about the Mediterranean twice over. And after the Mediterranean what of Worthing? I ask you!

  It would almost have been better never to have seen the loveliness, never to have dreamt the dreams, than to have had them for this brief span and then to be forced to return.

  It would almost be better to marry Pablo, who was young, and glorious, and glamorous, to go on living here, where at least there was sunshine and joy and the keen gladness of living,

  than to return to South Kensington and Henrietta Street.

  He would be a most unsatisfactory husband. He would cause her bitter grief and dreadful humiliation, but she would have some moments; she would have moments when she stood on

  the top of the mountain hand in hand with him, and that would be something.

  You cannot have everything in life.

  ‘Something is worrying you,’ said Oliver, looking at her across the table.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come out into the garden, if there is a garden …’

  ‘There isn’t. It is just forest, but it is all rather beautiful.’

  ‘Well, come into the forest and tell me all about it?’

  She said humbly, ‘I’d like to.’

  And she felt like a penitent going to confession.

  IV

  The forest struck her as being like a great green cathedral.

  Its branches met overhead in arches. The softness of the undergrowth drowned the noise of your footsteps, so that it was held in a sacred hush. The yellow sunshine fell in streams through the branches.

  ‘It is all rather wonderful,’ he said.

  They stood there, and the Tannenbaum stood round them like columns supporting the dark arches of some ancient church.

  ‘Now what has been happening?’ he asked. ‘It is that young man, isn’t it?’