Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

  “Not so well bred as you.”

  “My father was a baronet. My mother is an heiress, from America, don’t you know. As the wife of a baronet, perforce an English lady. Her Ladyship. I am simply a lady, also English. I would like to be a reporter.”

  She staggered somewhat. Regaining her balance, she clung to him more tightly. The pianist faded the tune and, without stopping, slid into “You’re the Top.”

  “Why do you want to be a reporter?”

  “Because I hate the rich and powerful, the privileged classes, and the rich and powerful hate reporters. Strange, isn’t it? The two have such a symbiotic relationship. Reporters are history’s paid spectators. I want to be a spectator when the rich are destroyed—front row, orchestra. I want to write it down and show it to them so they’ll be able to see it and know bloody well that they’ve been destroyed.”

  “Aren’t you rich?”

  “No, no. Certainly not. I have a little from my father, but my mother cut off all the rest.” She nodded toward the black man still watching them from the bar. “Because of Henry. Because of all my Negroes.”

  “I’d like to meet him. You didn’t introduce us.”

  “Henry can wait. I’m telling you why I want to be a reporter. I want to go to Abyssinia. I want to go to Spain, to the Spanish Republic. Do you know the Spanish well? They are such a marvelous people. They will be the one nation of Europe able to keep out the fascists.”

  “You hold out no hope for the French?”

  “Non. Rien. Pas de tout. The French live well and think well and eat and drink well and fuck very, very well, but they’re rather no good at dying, and it will take a frightful lot of dying to beat the fascists. The Spanish are good at it. They have the inner power. The inner resolve. They are born to die.”

  “The Spanish are simply Arabs who’ve taken up catholicism and wine.”

  “That’s bitter and cruel. They are more than Arabs. They have more than temper; they have passion.”

  “Even for anarchy.”

  “Anarchy is the quintessence of passion. Listen to my poem. I wrote this poem:

  ‘Love has destroyed my life, and all too long

  Have I been enemy with life, too late

  Unlocked the secrets of existence! there

  Found but the ashes of a fallen city

  Stamped underfoot, the temple of desires

  Run through with fire and perished with defeat …

  My loves have been voracious, many coloured,

  Fantastic, sober, all-encompassing,

  Have flown like summer swallows at the sun

  And dipped into a wintry world of water.’”

  They had stopped dancing. She urged him back to the rhythm of the music. He could feel her pelvis close against him.

  “Your poem,” he said.

  “It’s called ‘The Wreathe.’ It was in a book of poems I published. Nearly fifteen years ago. Outlaws, it was called. Let’s fuck.”

  “What?”

  “I want to fuck you.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Nancy.”

  “What about your friend?”

  “He’ll be fine. He’s just Henry.”

  Spencer was alone, adrift, on a ship, on the road in Chinese mountains, in the air in his fighter plane, floating across the yellow dead hills of wartime eastern France, the wind thrumming in the wires of the wings. Whitney was somewhere else, not in this world, in this life.

  “First let’s have another drink.”

  “No. No drink. Just a lovely little fuck precisely now, as a footnote to my poem.”

  Captain van der Heyden let the door slip closed behind him, then stepped through the entranceway curtain into the dim red light that illuminated the bridge of every ship at night. Only three men were present, uniforms and faces the same color in the glow from the lamps—two junior officers and the quartermaster. The latter stood almost motionless at the helm, which was on a raised platform at the rear wall, one of the shipbuilders’ more pointless concessions to the past. Any wave that could swamp the bridge would be so high on the ship it would sink it.

  “Good evening, Captain,” said the senior of the two officers. “Did you enjoy dinner?”

  “Too much talk about business.” He went over to side of the bridge where his chair was mounted, but instead of sitting, just stood staring out one of the forward windows, both hands on the wooden railing.

  Even so many decks above the engine room, he could feel the throbbing pulse of the shafts and turbines—a womblike sound, the constant beat of a mother’s heart, constant, and comforting. Mingled with the cyclic rise and fall of the ship’s pitching bow, it always brought peace to the captain.

  But contentment was not what he was about this night. He turned reluctantly and went to the chart table, where the other officer was marking their course. They were well into deep water. Soon the French and English coasts would be falling far behind, leaving them to the open sea.

  Van der Heyden went to the wire basket where the weather dispatches from the wireless room were deposited. The latest was less than an hour old. It noted warm and humid air lying over the Bay of Biscay and the channel approaches. That could mean fog. A static warm front was established to the north of them, but a cold front was approaching from the west. They would encounter dirty weather sometime the next day. The false October summer would at last be snatched away from them, replaced with the North Atlantic’s more customary blustery thrashing.

  The ship was sailing well, as gracefully as her sweeping lines had promised.

  “All ahead full,” said the captain.

  With a clang of brass, one of the officer’s sent the message for increased speed over the Siemens ship’s telegraph to the engine room far below. He glanced at the captain somewhat apprehensively.

  “Let us make time when it is pleasant to do so,” said van der Heyden.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The entrance curtain fluttered and young Kees Witte, the third officer, joined them.

  “I looked for you in the dining room, Captain,” he said.

  “Captains spend too much time in dining rooms.”

  Arthur Rostron, a Cunard captain, had once said that a passenger liner had three sides: the port side, the starboard side, and the social side. For van der Heyden, that side was always the one to weather. In addition to commanding a new and difficult vessel on its maiden voyage across the world’s most troublesome ocean, he had to play jovial host to his company’s most demanding officialdom, plus perform the rituals expected by the passengers. He had tried to make Lady Cunard feel a very special and honored guest, but she had proved a snappish and unpleasant woman, assaulting the conversation with barbs and witticisms his Dutch guests could scarcely comprehend and devoting almost all her attention to her British companions. She showed no interest whatsoever in his talk of ships and the sea. She wanted only gossip, preferably British.

  He had made a point of not inviting the famous American movie actress to his table, not knowing how she and the British would interact. He had kept away the proud Prussian nobleman and his sister because he thought they might be Nazis. He had enough troubles without Nazis.

  “All is well then, Kees?”

  The young man would be officer of the deck the next watch, until late into the night. Van der Heyden was working him now, having him deal with passengers’ special problems, not out of meanness but because he trusted greatly in Kees’s abilities.

  “Yes, Captain. There was a fight between two of the Malays. I had them locked up. There was a lost little girl, whom we reunited with her parents, and a woman in second class who really belonged in third. It’s all taken care of.”

  “And our very important passengers?”

  “All in their quarters, behaving themselves and staying out of sight.”

  “For tonight,” said the captain. “We have five more nights to go, at the least.”

  Civilization was a commodity that did not travel well. Wit
h each successive day of boredom, inactivity, and isolation from the rest of humanity and its laws and customs, passengers always began to lapse into their primitive state. Every voyage seemed to end just in time. Van der Heyden had sailed on a few ships when the voyages had ended a day or two too late.

  “Don’t let them get out of hand,” he said quietly to Kees. He looked up to the officer in charge. “I’ll be in my cabin.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Good night. Good sailing.”

  His cabin was just down the passageway. He locked the door behind him, slipped off his uniform coat, and sat down on the edge of his bunk. He poured himself a small glass of Bols. It would not hurt. All was well.

  Spencer lay still in the woman’s slender arms, still feeling the hard marks of the wooden bracelets in the flesh of his back. She was talking, and through the fog of his drunkeness and fatigue, he tried to listen. The air was heavy with the scent of their bodies and their lovemaking. He felt sweaty and physically beaten. It was she who had made love to him, not with tenderness and affection but with brutal gymnastic ardor. She knew many more things to do with hands and lips and genitals than did he, and had demonstrated them to him, but as practiced performer, not lover. He felt exhaustion, release, curiosity and gratitude, but not love. It was his impression that she felt nothing at all. She seemed as detached as a long-suffering martyr, or a prostitute. Perhaps both.

  He was no innocent. He reminded himself of that. He had just committed adultery against Whitney. But she committed adultery against him, every night she slept with Monsieur Charles Antoine de Mornay.

  Nancy sat up, still talking, pausing only to light a cigarette.

  “But you are pleased, are you not?” she said, exhaling. “You are satisfied, fulfilled?”

  “Yes. Enough.”

  “‘Enough.’ When I was young and pretty, this dainty scrap of flesh was considered more enchanting than ‘enough.’ I’ll thank you to know, O man of Paris, that an affair with me was often worth an entire book. You seem a literary chap. Are you familiar with Michael Arlen?”

  “Not to speak ill of your friends,” he said, “but I found him slick and superficial.”

  “And Armenian. But marvelous with words. His novel The Green Hat? Iris March? C’est moi. Lucy Tantamount in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point? C’est moi aussi. Yes, I slept with the horrid little man. Quite, quite. I’ve forgotten why. It was like having slugs crawling all over you.”

  Spencer looked groggily at his wristwatch. After a moment of squinting and blinking, he sat up.

  “It’s nearly three in the morning.”

  “Yes, well. It often is, if one stays up long enough.”

  “What about your friend, Henry?”

  “He’s fine. He always is, unless he needs money.”

  “Is he in his cabin?”

  “This is his cabin.”

  “He’s out there somewhere? A Negro man alone on this ship at night, with no place to go?”

  “He’s quite all right. He always is.”

  “Nancy. I must go.”

  “I think I rather like you, or could. I should like to get to know you.”

  “Yes, but not now, Nancy. Another time perhaps.”

  “Would you like to hear about Mother’s traveling companions? Some of them might interest you, newspaperman.”

  “Later, Nancy.”

  “One of them is the Prince of Wales.” She stared at him intently, but her expression was friendly.

  “Michael Arlen I can believe, but I must draw the line at the Prince of Wales.”

  “Suit yourself. There’s obviously something not quite right with your nose for news.”

  She gave him a chummy smile. He dressed clumsily. She didn’t bother. His last glimpse of her was of her bare bony back and buttocks as she leaned over her night table, pouring a drink.

  The bar would be closed. Bumping into the wall with the roll of the ship, he made his way down the deserted passageway to the doors leading out on deck.

  They were in misty waters. He could see a wavecap or two beyond the rail, but nothing more. No one was in view forward from where he stood. He turned and started aft, in search of a cold and tired black man, alone in the fog. Passing under a companionway, he came across a tall figure hunched against a stanchion, a tall man in a raincoat. Was Henry tall? He had not been wearing a raincoat. Just a black sports jacket and turtleneck sweater.

  His footstep quiet on the moist wood of the deck, Spencer approached, trying to think of a friendly, useful thing to say.

  “Henry?” he said, touching the tall man’s back.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, the man moved away. He didn’t look back at Spencer until he was at some distance. In the mist, his face was ghostly—youthful, but forbidding; familiar, but utterly strange. It was a cold face, like the weather. It was gone in an instant. The man was there, and then he wasn’t.

  Spencer blinked. He could barely hold up his head. He could scarcely remember his cabin number. He needed sleep. Half a day and night he’d been on this ship, and he’d accomplished nothing except to fill his belly with too much alcohol and warm the loins of a sad and crazy woman.

  In his dreams, he saw the man at the rail again. Awakening fitfully near dawn, he couldn’t remember the details of the dreams, except that they had something to do with flying. He and the man he’d encountered at the rail were trying to kill each other. In airplanes. The dream left him sweating. He’d had such nights before, but in recent years there’d been Whitney to comfort him, cradling his head against her bare white breast.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Kees Witte took over the watch at midnight, stepping into the eerie red half light by which the bridge was illuminated in the hours of darkness and coming to attention before the first officer, Van Groot, who only grunted. Studying Kees a moment, as he might inspecting some deck seaman on parade, the senior officer then gave Witte their current position and noted that the course changes for the watch were on the chart table. Grunting again, he disappeared through the curtains and out into the passageway. Kees presumed he was heading for one of the lounges, not for drink but to peruse the women. The first officer always made at least one conquest every voyage, though seldom was the woman his first or even second target.

  Karl Poeder, another junior officer, was already on the bridge. He was three years older than Kees but had several months’ less time in rank. They were friendly but not friends. The other officer seemed resentful of Kees’s seniority and the trust that van der Heyden had placed in him. Kees was not going to concern himself with that this night. He kept Poeder busy at the chart table, remaining himself near the dark front windows by the quartermaster and the helm. What view there was was mostly of the open working deck at the bow. It was faintly lit with just two light bulbs and full of shadows among the coiled hawsers, housings, and other gear. The sea before them had merged completely with the murky night. Kees peered forward into the black, his forehead pressed against the moist cold of the canted glass.

  The throbbing turbines vibrated the deck beneath his feet, giving him the sense of standing inside some living creature. The roll of the ship was still gentle, shifting his weight almost imperceptibly as he leaned against the wooden railing that ran along the interior of the bridge beneath the forward and side windows.

  The two of them spoke only infrequently, the Malay quartermaster not at all. Kees was able to tune his hearing to the ship, to every buzz and stutter of the electrical equipment, the lift and crushing fall of the bow upon the sea, the tuneful humming of machinery running in concert. He itched from nervousness, and felt the still-lingering heat of this autumn’s absurd tropical summer weather. Every one of his senses was laboring hard, crowding his brain with messages. Though nothing even mildly alarming had happened, and the ship seemed as fit and sure as any vessel he had sailed on, slicing through the water like some great, eager fish, this first watch of his was an ordeal, the worst of his career at sea.


  Kees had never before commanded the bridge. What he had thought would be a proud and glorious experience, one he had long daydreamed about, was proving to be unrelenting misery. No wonder van der Heyden sometimes drank.

  Kees gulped coffee, cup after cup. From time to time he left the darkened windows and paced the bridge. It didn’t help, and made the others nervous as well. He was already exhausted. His body ached for sleep but his mind burned with an almost electric wakefulness, a painful awareness of his responsibility and all the lives that the captain and first officer had placed in his trust.

  For a moment he thought he saw a glimmer of light ahead, but it quickly vanished. It should not be another ship. None was reported in the area their course was traversing. But it could be. It always could be.

  A light in the dark ahead. He remembered a translation from the Old Spanish of the ship’s log of Columbus’s Santa Maria on its first voyage: “The Admiral, being in the sterncastle, saw light, even though it was such a dim thing that he did not wish to assert that it might be land.”

  What might a light at sea be? Anything. On the sea, one’s fears were limitless, one’s expectations without constraint.

  For Columbus that next morning, the mysterious light proved to be the island of San Salvador—and the New World. Kees needed no such miracle. Only the familiar port of New York. To tie up at the familiar old pier at 52nd Street. That would be New World enough. That would be heaven on earth. It was nearly a week away.

  “Kees,” said Karl Poeder, who had come over from the chart table. “What do you make of the English we have in first class? One of the stewards said he heard that the Prince of Wales was among them.”

  Kees laughed, with something of a nervous squeak. “De Prinz? If he were aboard everybody would know. I think these are mostly lords and dukes—friends of the prince, maybe.”

  “Lord Mountbatten, the one who’s a naval officer. He is the prince’s cousin, isn’t he?”

  “Ja, but he’s not so much. A lieutenant commander, I think.”

  “Maybe we should invite him to come up to the bridge sometime.”

  “We have enough problems.”