by Patrick Gale
‘I’ll be fine,’ he assured Darius. ‘I’ll just eat something up here. Some sandwiches. A glass of wine. I’ll be fine.’
‘Nonsense,’ his uncle protested. ‘You can’t hide up here indefinitely. You’ve got to face them all some time. We have to dine in public tonight as we’re guests of the shipping line. Anyway, those ghastly people in customs are probably travelling down on Mariner Deck or whatever it was called, and will have asked to eat at six-thirty. There are nearly five hundred people on board, probably more including all the staff and crew. It’s like a floating city. You’ll hardly ever see the same people twice unless you try to.’
When his mother and Darius had presented him with the cruise invitation, they had been so busy talking, trying to convince him, possibly trying to convince themselves, that they had not noticed his lack of response. He had not said no, but he had not agreed either. Truth to say, he found the very idea bewildering. He continued to feel a profound sense of blame. In the rapid dissolution of his home and his work, no one was at fault but he and he felt he merited some punishment. Even if the removal of his daughter were considered punishment enough, he still did not feel worthy of worldly treats. Yet here he was, royally treated.
He had seized on various large-scale projects in his mother’s garden because planting and pruning seemed to be the only area in which he was not left paralysed by indecision and he could not bear inactivity, as it turned him in on himself. He could not pursue Bonnie for fear that might drive her away still further. She knew how much he loved the child, she knew how much this was hurting him. She held a gun to his heart. The next move had to be hers. If, from all his conflicting needs he had to select one, it would be to have Lucy back. Bonnie he could accept as lost, a hostage to his own ingratitude and crass stupidity, but Lucy had become such a vital component of his life that the loss of her was like a removal of sunlight or water and he could not function in her absence. Without her it was all one to him whether he was in his house or his mother’s, in a prison cell or a liner stateroom. He entered into a bland passivity, mindful that if he could not please himself, he might, at least, avoid displeasing others. If his uncle wanted his unrewarding company suddenly, he should have it. If his mother suddenly required him to learn bridge, he would try his level best.
She lent him a book on the subject but he found he only stared at the text and diagrams without taking anything in. Perceiving the problem, she set up a card table in the sitting room and, for several successive afternoons, her odd new friend, Hecate Murray, was pressed in as a fourth while his mother played both first and third player.
‘The game falls into three parts,’ she explained. ‘Hand assessment, bidding and play. Play is exactly like whist. You remember whist, don’t you, darling?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. Well. Never mind. We cut for dealer. Aces high and the suits go spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs in descending order. So. You’re dealer, see?’
‘No.’
‘It’s quite easy. Hecate cuts to you as she’s on your right. That’s it. Now you deal the whole pack out into four piles of thirteen. That’s it. Now we sort out hands into suits and assess their worth. Aces are four, kings three, queens two, knaves one. You count points for voids, singletons and doubletons but that’s later.’
‘You’ve lost me. Sorry.’
‘Surely not. Am I going too fast, Hecate?’
‘Just a little, dear. But I’m with you. I think.’
‘Well the trick is not to question anything yet. Just accept and remember.’
‘Like a new religion.’
‘Yes, Hecate. If you like.’
The week before their departure, Darius had swooped down on his sister’s house and taken Lawrence to London to buy him a wardrobe.
‘Something I’ve been meaning to do for years.’
Lawrence watched his reflection in a succession of mahogany looking-glasses as he was kitted out with a dinner jacket, a linen suit the colour of old newspaper, black shoes, suede brogues, deck shoes, swimming trunks, shorts, impenetrable tortoiseshell sunglasses and a bouquet of shirts of startling hues but impeccable quality.
‘People will think I’m your boyfriend,’ he said, who had worn nothing but jeans and rugger shirts for as long as he could remember. Darius stared at him a moment as they stood on a Jermyn Street pavement.
‘What better alias could you hope for? You’re fixed in the public mind as a suspected uxoricide, not a rich man’s clothes horse.’
Before dinner, they had to attend the captain’s drinks party. It was a strained affair. Darius was keen to meet the officers but found they were all Norwegian and spoke only strenuously polite English devoid of ironic nuance. Nobody had met anyone else before, so passengers stood about with their travelling companions, overtures were muted, introductions led only to doomed dribbles of conversation. The sole genuine revelry emerged when a group of Norwegian Englishwomen boarded. They had all married British soldiers after the last world war, left their homeland for love and now, apparently, formed a loyal social club which organized group holidays for them. The officers fell on them with Norse cries of delight and a bottle of highly toxic warmed aquavit began to circulate. It was served in small Viking helmets of translucent plastic. Darius and Lawrence downed two apiece before braving the dining room.
This was an oval, windowless space the size and style of an Odeon cinema, plunging down through three deck levels in the SS Paulina’s heart. It glittered with chrome railings, bevelled glass and polished wood and was plainly one of the few areas where the ship’s original 1930s details had been left unaltered. On panels of beaten tin, Art Deco imagery was chosen to remind one of none but the tamest, sand-bordered water. Muscular boys carried a swimsuited girl aloft, hatchet-faced children tossed a ball, women raced on bicycles, men on foot. There was not an iceberg, breaker, lighthouse or shark in sight. As throughout the ship, there were no curtains nor any freely dangling soft furnishings whose sudden change in angle to the walls might emphasize the great boat’s churning motion through the ocean.
Lawrence was sure heads turned and people stared as they made their entrance but Darius assured him they were glancing up at everyone who entered.
‘It’s first night curiosity, that’s all. Besides, if they do recognize you, they won’t show it. Those sort of people will have eaten earlier. Now. Something to take away the filthy taste of that dry-cleaning fluid, I think …’
They shared their table with two other non-matrimonial pairs. There was a mother travelling with her grown-up daughter. The daughter, who had Down’s syndrome, was wreathed in smiles but struck dumb by shy confusion. Her mother had been abandoned by her husband when the girl was still a child, had taken to bridge to fill her lonely evenings and, she confessed, had become ‘quite obsessed’ with the game to the point of teaching it in her local adult education centre. The daughter, Jess, would occasionally lean her head on her mother’s shoulder or reach out to squeeze her arm. The mother pretended to be embarrassed at such displays of powerful affection but Lawrence noticed how they warmed her and disarmed, even now the afflicted girl had lost the sweetness of childhood. Lawrence smiled at Jess as he offered her the bread basket. She shied away at first then, deciding he was friendly, smiled broadly at him whenever she fancied his face was turned in her direction.
The other pair were an attractive brother and sister in their thirties. Reuben Calder, whose manner was too calm for comfort, his eyes too bright, his teeth too sharp, had been hired to write about the cruise for a leading women’s magazine and, like Darius, had brought a spare relative along for the free ride. He and Darius promptly fell to high-octane small talk, while Jess began to have difficulties with her food and annexed all her mother’s attention. Thus the spare relatives were thrown together. Bee was conventionally pretty, with a heart-shaped face, generous lips and dark brown hair which she tucked repeatedly behind her ears. He was not surprised to notice her wedding ring or learn that she taught the junior form
at a cathedral choir school, but he was when she said the school was in his home town.
‘But I’m from Barrowcester too,’ he exclaimed. ‘I was even at your school.’
‘I know,’ she said, adding in a rapid undertone. ‘I’m sure you don’t want to talk about it but I think the newspapers have treated you and your mother dreadfully. I’m so very sorry. I– er– Well. News travels fast in a place like that.’
Her kindness wrong-footed him. Something about him – the illusion held in common with half the country, perhaps, that she knew all the salient points of his intimate life – caused her to drop her guard as well. As they talked of their ambivalent feelings towards life in a provincial backwater, she told him how her husband, the cathedral organist, had died a few years ago of a brain haemorrhage and she had subsequently suffered a faintly disgraceful romantic disappointment with a rugger-playing colleague who had gone on to marry her best friend. He saw that she was so given to frowning in self-deprecation that her high forehead was permanently marked, scarred by care. She saw him glance at her wedding ring and instinctively covered it with her other hand, then twisted it about.
‘I thought quite seriously about leaving it off for the cruise,’ she said. ‘Reuben said it would mislead people and cramp my style. Anyway, I’d never taken it off, never, and my finger must have grown fatter since poor Tony married me because it wouldn’t budge and I had to use olive oil to slide it off. But it left this awful ring of pale, yellowy skin, like a kind of brand – the merry widow’s mark – which never seemed to fade, so I put the ring back on. I mean, better to be passed over and taken for a married woman than mistaken for a would-be adulteress. Sorry. That sounds rather old-fashioned. I teach too much divinity. Adulteress. Fornication. Whore. There are no kind words. No neutral ones.’
Lawrence discarded his inedibly tough lamb cutlet and helped himself to more potatoes and gravy.
‘Do you think marriage is so respectable?’ he asked.
‘Sorry. I’m putting my foot in it.’
‘No you’re not. Do you?’ he repeated.
She teased her ring again.
‘I always used to.’ She smiled to herself, frowning. ‘Funny. I couldn’t wait to be Mrs Some Man’s Name. I thought it sounded so grown-up. I still do, when I’m addressing Christmas cards. All those invisible, stately female presences. Mrs Clive Hart. Mrs St John Delaney-Siedentrop. And I still find Miss sounds brave and rather sad and Ms is inaudible really, because no one knows how to pronounce it so that it sounds different, and if they do, they pull a silly face when they do it, as if to apologize for being modern. Of course marriage is respectable,’ she went on firmly. ‘It’s hypocritical, it’s outdated, but what else is there? Supported by law and church, it’s rock solid.’ She eased off her ring with another small frown. ‘There,’ she said, and dropped it on her side plate with a clatter that made the others turn to look at her. ‘I’ve just become a merry widow for the duration,’ she told them and laughed in a way that made Lawrence want to shield her from the room.
‘Tell me about trees,’ Jess’s mother asked Lawrence firmly as if to say that she thought things needed bringing back to less slippery territory. ‘Do we have any native varieties left or has the whole country been invaded by imports?’ And as Lawrence began to answer her, he watched Bee fall to a nervously rapid consumption of her cutlet.
It was marketed as a bridge cruise. The Paulina also hosted cruises for ballroom dancing, country and western music, detoxification, chess and weight loss. In fact all its cruises followed roughly the same routes and daily timetables with fruit carving demonstrations, fancy dress parties, gambling, bingo and nightly entertainment while the particular theme of each cruise was merely slotted into a few spare hours a day. On the bridge cruises, the library and the largest bar were permanently set up with card tables and stocked with fresh decks of cards, pencils, duplicate wallets and score sheets, though nothing so fearsome as bidding boxes. As the on-board expert, Darius had to be available every morning and evening to act as tournament director, tutor or match pathologist as required. Avoid blundering novices as he might, strictly speaking he was to refuse no one a game.
Jess’s mother had clearly been living in hope but Jess became seasick and they were forced to abandon the dining room before the arrival of some glutinous yellow puddings fringed with pineapple. Reuben, who was clearly better than proficient, had already agreed to play and Lawrence, who had hoped to escape, was alarmed to find brother and sister pressing him to join them.
‘You’ve read the book, haven’t you?’ Darius asked him.
‘Yes,’ Lawrence lied, ‘but– ’
‘And Dora laid on a few rubbers for you?’
‘Yes, only– ’
‘Well then.’
‘It’s only glorified whist,’ Reuben added. ‘You’ll love it. We’ll only play rubber bridge. Nothing scary like duplicate.’
‘You’re on this boat for three weeks,’ Darius reminded him. ‘You can’t escape indefinitely and I’m relying on you to save me in case Mrs Night-School comes back.’
‘Tell you what,’ Bee suggested kindly. ‘You can partner me. Reuben has to win, whatever he says, and would only get cross with you. I never get cross.’
‘Oh all right. But I’m going to be useless.’
‘So?’ She smiled. ‘How do you know I’m not?’
‘This is Hell. This is Hell. I’m so bad you’ve no idea,’ he muttered as they all headed upstairs to the library and coffee. He was surprised to feel her take his arm.
‘Don’t worry!’ she chuckled. ‘We’ll play no conventions but a strong no trump – that’s sixteen to eighteen points and a flat hand …’ And she reassured him by repeating the old wives’ sayings of the game which his mother had already striven to impress on him during his period of intensive tuition. Lead into Dummy’s strength and round to his weakness. Cover an honour with an honour. Three noes and a fool goes. If in doubt, lead trumps out. Second plays low, third plays high.
He followed these sayings obediently. He led his singletons, he high-lowed his doubletons, he led the highest of his partner’s suit and duly returned her opening leads but Reuben and Darius tripped him up with their low cunning. They misleadingly discarded picture cards then devastated his humble tactics and won tricks with mere twos and threes. They somehow calculated precisely what he held in his hand so that his hard-saved aces and kings, which he had trusted would flummox them, were rendered powerless by coolly dropped junior trumps or by an aching lack of appropriate leads. Reuben showed a nasty tendency to crow that was made no better by Darius’s impatient sighs.
Bee’s patience was saintly however.
‘Never mind,’ she would say, as he laid down a woefully underbid dummy or gave their opponents extra tricks by discarding apparently insignificant fives and sevens that would otherwise have mysteriously brought them in one trick short of a contract. Having won his assurance that he did not mind her doing so, she quietly and concisely explained where he had gone wrong after each game.
‘Never mind,’ she said sweetly as he apologized as yet another rubber fell to the enemy. ‘You’ll soon learn. We were all beginners once anyway. Their contract was impregnable. Your lead was fine. You weren’t to know Rube had a void. It was just bad luck and after that we didn’t stand a chance.’ Where anyone else might reasonably have shown anger or at least a mild vexation, she gave merely a wry, private smile. He thought of her husband’s death and tried to imagine her wild with grief.
When Bee pleaded exhaustion after five rubbers, Lawrence seized the opportunity to leave the library with her, thus freeing Reuben and Darius to find another pair to trounce.
‘I wasn’t really tired,’ she confessed. ‘I just felt them itching to move on to greater things and Reuben can be such hell when he’s winning too much.’
The third deck from the top, the deck above the library, was dedicated to fitness. There was a large, glass-walled gym at one end, a swimming pool for those w
ho scorned the lazy pleasures of the bubbling lounge pools on the sun deck, and a squash court. The rest of the deck was open to the elements. A basketball court was marked out at the stern and the outer perimeter formed a jogging track, punctuated by benches for the breathless and the idle. Lawrence walked with Bee about the track, enjoying the buffeting of the wind and the sickening roll of the ship as it ploughed the black wastes of the Atlantic. They passed a few intrepid moonlit joggers and a grey-faced family evidently trying the fresh air method for battling their sea sickness. She reminisced about childhood crossings to the Isle of Wight and suddenly he was pouring out his heart about how much he missed Lucy and how he would probably not see her now for years. Bonnie had taken her to America. The child would be raised an American, with a rich American father. Lawrence would be denied access and when, at last, he met Lucy again, they would be strangers.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m being pathetic and melodramatic. And pissed. Don’t encourage me. I moan with no encouragement. And I’ve no right.’
‘You’ve every right,’ she said and suddenly they were kissing.
She was the only woman apart from Bonnie who had kissed him in years and the effect was as electrifying as any teenage grope. Had he considered her earlier in a sexual light, it would never have happened. He would have considered her, rejected the possibility and passed on safely unperturbed. He usually did. Any new woman to enter his orbit was immediately assessed, albeit from a purely theoretical angle. He assumed this was something all men did, like sniffing shirts to see if they could wear them twice or shaking a few times after they finished having a piss in case of drips. Bee, however, had somehow eluded the usual process and been simply the person she was, a sympathetic ear, a kind smile, a pensive gaze.
He pressed her against one of the steel girders that held the lifeboats aloft, newly aware that she had unexpectedly generous breasts, and felt his heart pound as if he had drunk too much coffee.