Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

  Her head was wobbly, but to her amazement, she felt no more than a little queasy. At dinner she had followed the German count’s advice from the previous night, avoiding spicy and unsettling foods and stuffing herself with potatoes and good Dutch bread. Her stomach felt relatively secure.

  It might be better, though, if she were thoroughly sick, confined to her bed and aware only of nausea. As it was, she was fully cognizant of every wrench and creak and slam and thud, of every terrifying manifestation of their peril. She wondered why there had been no alarm sounded. With such violent movement, they surely must be sinking.

  Rising, grasping at the furniture as she moved forward, she made her clumsy way out into her sitting room, pausing once there to rest in a chair near a porthole. Catching her breath and her equilibrium, she turned to kneel backward on the chair and peer out the porthole glass at the deck.

  That was a mistake. The parade of gigantic waves galloping so furiously by the rail beyond overwhelmed all her senses. She could not imagine how they were going to live through the day.

  Nora huddled in her thin nightdress, cold hands gripping bare, folded shivering arms. She closed her eyes a moment, trying to keep back tears. She would have been miserable this morning no matter what the weather. The Coopers may have been duchess’s daughter and earl’s nephew, but he had behaved as grossly and awfully as the most slobbering, filthy-minded, unscrupulous Hollywood creep—and they, at least, usually offered roles in movies.

  Duff Cooper behaved as if he had bought her for five dollars in a Maumee, Ohio, roadhouse. While his wife blithefully chattered on, he had shoved his hand beneath the tablecloth up Nora’s thigh to the top of her stocking. She was terrified of making a scene over this but didn’t know what else to do. Finally she turned vigorously away to talk to the captain, who decorously ignored Cooper’s lascivious antics. And then Duff moved his hand to the waist of her backless dress, sliding his fingers down to the base of her spine, one finger wedged between the curves of soft skin.

  She had stood up, knocking her chair over. Excusing herself without explanation, she hurriedly left the table, but Duff came in pursuit no more than a minute after, tracking her to the door of her suite, grasping her by the waist and muttering what he must have presumed were endearing and sweet entreaties into her ear.

  For all his charm and high bearing, Nora was repulsed. She could think of only one escape, one calling up much of her talent as an actress. She feigned gagging, slipping about within the grasp of his arms as she clutched her stomach. Open mouthed, she made as if to cover the front of his evening clothes with dinner. Startled, gentlemanly apologetic, he backed away and then fled.

  Just another rotten night in a holiday that had consisted of little else. Worse was the knowledge that her ploy had surely provided only a temporary respite. He would be back at her as soon as he thought her well enough to jump.

  But Duff or no Duff, storm or no storm, she was not going to remain a prisoner in her cabin. She was, as all the world must someday learn, the indomitable Nora Gwynne.

  The storm excited Spencer. When he opened the outside door of his stateroom and leaned out over the deck, the cold, wet, furious reality of it invigorated him fiercely. He stood, breathing in the moist, stinging air, listening to the crash and roar and the whistle of the wind, feeling as if the sea had come to greet him, to invite him to come see all its wonders.

  He was passionate about the ocean this way, as intoxicated with its scents and intimacy and wildness as he ever was with Whitney. Flying airplanes, he rejoiced in cold, calm, crystalline air, in which he could soar to the greatest possible heights and sit behind his rumbling engine seeing all the universe. With the sea, he loved it crazed and tempestuous—not the dull flatness they had been traversing since leaving Le Havre but the hellish boil that had kept mariners clinging to coastal waters for century after century until the Vikings and, later, Columbus.

  He looked down. Amazingly, if somewhat wet, the morning’s collection of ship’s announcements was at his feet. Spencer picked up the first piece of paper, the picturegram of the day’s weather forecast. It was incredible. Of the eight squares, the one with the bright-yellow sunburst captioned “sunny” had been circled. The “expected temperature” was written in as 100 degrees.

  He stepped back and closed the door, looking at the weather sheet again and then setting it aside. The one-page “Ocean News” was more compelling, if no less unreal.

  Greek President Alexander Zaimis had been voted out of office by the Greek assembly, which had then voted to restore the monarchy.

  British Imperial Airways had purchased two huge flying boats to investigate the possibility of trans-Atlantic air passenger service to compete with ships. A United Air Lines transport had crashed near Cheyenne, Wyoming, killing all twelve aboard, including the pilot, H. A. “No Collision” Collison, who had given famed aviator Wiley Post his first airplane ride.

  The Nazi government had forbidden the Hohenzollern family to fly the flag of its royal house, stating that the swastika was the only official emblem permitted for the German Reich.

  The Russian government had asked for League of Nations intervention in Abyssinia, fearing that the Germans and Japanese would exploit Western refusal to stop the Italian invasion with military aggression of their own.

  An Italian admiral had returned a medal awarded him by the British for assistance to their forces in the 1902–04 campaign against the mullah in British Somaliland.

  The Italian air force had bombed the Abyssinian fortress of Dagnere on the Webbe Shibeli River.

  And finally, actress Dolores Costello had filed suit for divorce against John Barrymore, charging cruelty and desertion and asking for both of their automobiles, two rifles, and a shotgun, as well as repairs to their Beverly Hills house.

  Another announcement said that there would be special sales of British woolens and French perfume at the shopping center in the first-class main hall. The movie that day was Dinner for Three, starring Cary Grant, Nora Gwynne, and Amberson Hayes. Nora Gwynne.

  Spencer put all this aside and looked out the porthole. He was puzzled that Edwina had neither come to him nor tried to contact him, but decided not to telephone her and run the risk of a chat with Lord Mountbatten. He missed her. She had become mixed up in the pain he still felt over Whitney. In an odd way, so had Nancy Cunard.

  Edwina had left a small pearl earring on his dresser. He put it in a jacket pocket as he completed his morning preparations, bundling finally in a tightly buttoned trench coat and Scottish wool cap.

  The wind was too fierce for him to go far forward, though standing before the bow of the ship had been one of the privileges of first class he had looked forward to the most. But, sliding and slipping, he made it to the rail. Peering over it into a swirling cavity of foam and cerulean blue, the very bowels of the ocean seemingly in view, he felt exultant. The thrilling pleasure remained even as a sudden, unseen wave rushing back from the bow showered him with cold water. He ducked and shouted like a happy boy, then was surprised to hear another voice next to him.

  It was a woman, dressed in yellow oilskins obviously borrowed from a crewman, for they were much too large for her. Curly tufts of blond hair stuck out from beneath her dripping hat. Her cheeks were wet and rosy, and she had eyes that were at once the bluest and the grayest he had ever seen.

  “Guten morgen,” she said. “Excuse me. Good morning.”

  “Ich spreche Deutsch,” he said, recognizing her from the Le Havre railroad station.

  “Ja. Well, isn’t it wonderful, der zee? Wunderbar!”

  Another passing wave dashed water against their faces. The roll of the ship pulled back at them, but they gripped the rail tightly. When at last the Wilhelmina began to shift back again, the woman peered over the side as he had done, holding onto her hat.

  “What power!” she said. “Solch Wut. Das Wut von Gott.”

  “It’s very humbling,” he said.

  “I feel so furchtsam—timid,
” she said. “I ride horses. I fly airplanes. I climb mountains, I shoot big game. But I am a bad swimmer. Here I would drown.”

  “Here Gertrude Ederle would drown. Do not feel timid. Feel simply human. That’s why God created storms. To remind.”

  The blond woman had been smiling hugely at the sea. She lessened the expression to something more correct as she reached to grip his hand.

  “Entschuldigen sie, bitte,” she said. “I am the Countess von Bourke und Kresse. Dagne von Kresse will do. Und Ihnen?”

  “Ich heisse Jim Spencer. C. Jamieson Spencer. Von Paris, und Chicago.”

  “Entzückende. I must get back to my brother. He has trouble getting about in this heavy weather. Wiedersehen. I leave you to be human with God.” She smiled again.

  Like the storm, she had cheered him. It hadn’t mattered that she was German.

  Nora went to the first-class verandah grill for breakfast, making a hard, lurching progress along the corridors, slipping and banging her elbow twice. Her pale skin bruised easily. She feared she’d have to wear long gloves with her evening gown that night. She hated them because they made her hands sweat.

  The headwaiter took her to a large table near the side windows on the starboard side. There were only four or five others in the room and there was little chance she’d be bothered, though she was feeling lonely this morning and wouldn’t mind company, of the right sort. Not philandering English gentlemen.

  She glanced about at the other breakfasters. As she almost should have expected, the damned American was there, the omnipresent slender, handsome man from the Ritz Bar, from the de Mornays’, from the train, from the lifeboat drill, from the ends of the earth. He nodded politely as their eyes met but immediately went back to the book he’d been reading.

  Perhaps it was she who was haunting him.

  “Boiled potatoes and toast,” she said to the Oriental waiter when he came. “And hot tea.”

  “Boiled potatoes, missy? Boiled potatoes not on the menu.”

  “That’s what I want. Boiled potatoes, please. With a little paprika.”

  As usual, she was being too polite. If for once she started acting like a movie star, she might be treated like one.

  “Yes, missy. We try. We try.”

  As he moved away, she wished she had stayed in her cabin or, indeed, had never boarded the Wilhelmina. It was her lucky, lucky day. The storm, the strange American, and now Duff and Diana Cooper, standing in wobbly fashion at the grill’s entrance, waiting to be escorted to a table.

  Fortunately, they were looking the other way, at the headwaiter, who was busying himself with a steward.

  Nora was desperate but helpless. She couldn’t just dash past them, but it was the only way out. She had no newspaper to hide behind. If she lingered much longer, Duff would see her and the Coopers would descend upon her table. Nora needed to act at once, and to her dismay, there was only one thing she could do.

  Moving quickly, she crossed over to the American’s table and sat down in the chair opposite him, fumbling nervously with her hands as she snatched up a napkin. He still made her feel quite spooky with his mysterious and constant presence, but she could say this for him: He might not be an English gentleman, but he had not put his hand on her bare buttocks during the last night’s dinner.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “May I join you?”

  Her expression seemed to reflect so many conflicting emotions, Spencer was as perplexed as he was amused—and pleased.

  “You already have,” he said gently. “In any event, you’re certainly welcome.”

  “I’m really sorry. I’m trying to avoid someone.”

  “Obviously not me. For once.”

  She smiled but looked no less troubled.

  “No, that seems impossible.” It unsettled her further that she found herself warming to his presence. For all that he had frightened her in recent days, there was something oddly comforting about him. “It’s that couple the maître d’ is taking to a table. They’re English. She’s an aristocrat or something and he’s supposed to be a very important man in the government. Anyway, he’s a masher. He was pawing me at dinner last night, just outrageously, and at the captain’s table.”

  “First class is very small.” Spencer set his book aside. “It’s hard to avoid one’s peers.”

  “Pardon?”

  “A joke. Not a very good one. Like this thing.” He showed her the weather forecast form predicting a hundred degrees and sunshine.

  “That’s crazy,” she said.

  “I asked a steward. He said someone slipped a bunch of these in with the real ones. The real ones predict fifty degrees and stormy. We have a real comedian aboard.”

  “This is the strangest trip I’ve ever taken.”

  Her eye caught the movement outside the window. It was entirely vertical. There was a glimpse of the horizon. Then, as the ship plunged on in its roll, the line of sky rose upward and disappeared, the window filling with a lifting curtain of green and swirling white that went on endlessly. Finally it stopped. The motion reversed itself until the horizon slowly reappeared and then vanished again, as the view turned to one of dark and angry clouds.

  He followed her gaze.

  “I used to spend hours this way,” he said, “crossing the Atlantic in a convoy during the war. I’d see an escort vessel on the horizon, and then the ship would roll and there’d be nothing but water, and when we righted ourselves the escort would be gone from the stage.”

  “Not sunk?”

  “No, although we could never be sure.”

  “You were a flier, weren’t you? You won a lot of medals. I was told that, that night at the de Mornays’.”

  “I flew, but there weren’t a lot of medals.”

  “I met Lindbergh once. At a dinner in New York. It was for the governor of New Jersey.”

  “I wish you could meet him again. Right here, today.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. A sort of joke, with myself. Perhaps on myself.”

  “Mr. Spencer, it’s no exaggeration to say I don’t exactly understand you.”

  The Oriental waiter started toward the table she had abandoned, saw her, and changed course toward them.

  “You eat here, missy?” he said, setting down her potatoes and toast. “You not like other table?”

  He had only half filled her teacup, but the ship’s slide caused its contents to slosh over the side nevertheless. A flower vase on the next table tipped over, rolled, and fell to the floor with a loud crash. The table vases were made of expensive Irish crystal.

  “They must have been a handsome couple once,” said Spencer, looking at the Coopers after the waiter had gone. “It’s funny how people become caricatures of themselves as they get older.”

  “They’re still quite attractive,” Nora said. “But I’m not attracted. He behaved like a real lug.”

  Instead of eating, she fidgeted, then lighted a cigarette.

  Another waiter was coming toward them, bearing something on a silver tray that was not food. He’d been at the Coopers’ table.

  It was a calling card. Nora picked it up, then stared at the back of it in fury.

  “What a creep,” she said. “He’s asking us to join them.”

  “Mademoiselle,” said Spencer, taking the card from her. “You are dealing with an English rake, as they like to style themselves. They’re hopeless, but something can be done.” He handed the card back. “Write this on it: ‘If you want to see me, come to the first-class cinema at eleven o’clock.’”

  “But I don’t want to meet him at the movie theater.”

  “You don’t have to. If you haven’t noticed, the movie today is that film you made with Cary Grant, Dinner for Three. If he comes, there’ll you’ll be.”

  For a moment she thought he was mocking her, but his gaze and manner were quite sincere. He grinned.

  “Aren’t you clever,” she said. She took up a pen and wrote what Spencer said on the card and g
estured to the waiter to take it back to the Coopers’ table. She was enjoying this, in a way. “I was embarrassed to see that film on the schedule. Now you’ve made it worthwhile.”

  “If you want to avoid him the rest of the day,” Spencer said, “go over to second class. No one will bother you, and they have movies and other amusements, too.”

  She reached and touched his hand, a gesture of gratitude and friendship.

  “You’re actually a kind and funny man. I’m a little surprised. You still frighten me a bit, but it goes away, talking to you. I’m sorry if I’ve been rude.”

  “Such flattery. Finish your breakfast and then make a break for it. I’ll stage some rearguard action to keep him at bay.”

  “You’re being very nice.”

  “You set a good example.”

  “Thanks. Thanks really very much, Mr. Spencer.”

  Lady Emerald stepped beyond the pale—through the connecting doors that led into second class—to her mind, stepping into the hell that was the middle class. Judging by the nondescript dress of the few other passengers she encountered in this inferior region, it was every bit as degrading as she feared.

  Clinging to the passageway railing, feeling old and vulnerable in this storm, Emerald kept repeating her daughter’s cabin number over and over in her mind, so she’d make no mistake. She wished to speak to no one else in this place but Nancy.

  She might have to spend a large part of the day here, if Nancy wished. Whatever it took, she would make the sacrifice. She had sworn an oath to it. She and Nancy would reconcile. It would not be said that Emerald, Lady Cunard, was without a mother’s heart, or noblesse esprit.

  It would not have done to have kept pressing Nancy to join her in first class. Ultimately, her daughter would have given in only by dragging Henry Crowder along with her, and that would have been the end of all of them.

  Emerald came to the correct cabin number, drew up her courage, and rapped on the door. There was no response. She rapped harder, then pounded in frustration. She could not bear to have made this unhappy journey for nothing.