‘Comes with the rations, as you very well know, Gus. The important thing is to get the message out.’
‘What message?’
‘The message that Britain can cope. We’ve had our little domestic differences, but basically this is a vibrant modern economy bursting with ideas and the can-do spirit. Particularly important to get this across to the Americans.’
‘Isn’t that the Foreign Office’s job?’
‘Naturally, that’s what the F.O. thinks. But Ministers think we need to have someone out there who has been at the sharp end, someone who can tell them about the real Britain.’
‘Out where?’
‘New York. You’ll be attached to the Consulate, of course, but it’ll be a roving brief, tariff negotiations, airline route allocations, and above all, presentation with a capital P. In my humble submission, it’s the best job around, at your level of course. The other guys in the department will be eating their hearts out. But with your experience there’s no other possible candidate.’
‘Thank you very much,’ I said, my mind wallowing in thoughts of Woden Heath: the broken tarmac, the brooding smell of gas, the little houses petering out into desolate industrial estates and the scrubby heathland beyond with its overgrown disused mineshafts, and the nasal Black Country voices bickering in the clammy dawn.
‘When do I –’
‘The sooner the better. Sort yourself out a passage, first-class, of course. We don’t want to look cheap.’
By that effortless knack of self-deception so necessary to success in public life he really did seem to have forgotten exactly what I had been doing. A month or so of gathering facts and figures and passing them back to the office had been transmuted into a heroic feat of daring and initiative comparable with a spell on the North-West Frontier during the worst of the Pathan wars. All the same, I was grateful. This was a moment to escape. Whatever type of fiasco might be waiting in America, it must be better than the dismal prospects at home.
I looked in at Go Now with a light and skipping heart. Under the pretext of buying a ticket, I had a curious desire to see Bobs again.
‘First-class eh? You don’t want to waste the opportunity.’ Bobs was back to yapping mode.
‘How do you mean?’
‘You take a cheaper flight and charge them the rate for going first. Everyone does it. No, I’ve got an even better idea. It’s here somewhere.’
He rummaged around the chaos on his desk and came up with a fuchsia-pink ticket folder.
‘Free passage to the Big Apple on the Zephyr. Heavensent Cruises sent us this freebie for their introductory cruise. Unique, unforgettable, etcetera, etcetera, thank your Uncle Bobs. Don’t worry about the paperwork. I’ll just send you the receipt for the air ticket and you bank the cheque.’
‘Um.’
‘Oh come on now.’
The pitying look that creased his little pug face was unbearable. Bad enough to have to recognise him as a friend of the People, especially when the People had won a great victory, which didn’t happen often, but to be patronised as a stuffed-shirt by Bobs the fly operator, the man who knew his way around. . . . Well, if there was trouble, it was always possible to pretend the travel agent had sent the wrong bill.
‘All right then, if you insist.’
A smile unclenched the pug face.
‘She sails in three days’ time. From Tilbury.’
It turned out to be Southampton. Bobs and Helen insisted on coming down in the train to see me off, almost as though they wanted to make certain I really did take the boat. They sat opposite holding hands. To an outsider they must have looked well suited, these two small neat figures and both of them so fair. In fact, I imagined the soft-looking woman, fiftyish, sitting next to me must be thinking sweet sentimental thoughts about them, which might be why she had her head cocked on one side, as people do when amused by the antics of children or pets. We were passing through the first chalky downs of Hampshire at the time and I was staring out of the window looking at a great white crevasse with wind-blown beech trees teetering above it, and thinking how odd Helen’s life was, and why did she always fetch up with these substandard characters, and why was she still so superior, not in the sense of being proud, but unsullied by these relationships.
‘Hurrkudhoulohurddo.’
‘What? Sorry?’
‘Clokeriddo, eese.’
The soft-looking woman pointed at the window then fell back gasping into her corner seat, in the same movement pulling out of her big floppy bag an orange plastic mask with a tube running from it. She clamped this to her face, and a gentle breathing sound filled the carriage.
As I rose to pull up the strap, I caught sight of the fuchsia-pink Heavensent label dangling from her suitcase on the rack. The label said Mrs George Fitch, SS Zephyr. Suddenly the whole expedition seemed not a welcome escape but a ghastly trap, as though all concerned – Hilary Puttock, Bobs and Helen too, for she had said it was a brilliant opportunity – had conspired to get me out of the way.
At the quayside, there was no way of not telling Mrs Fitch we were travelling on the same boat, since the pink Heavensent labels were dangling from my luggage too and she didn’t seem to be blind as well as speech-afflicted.
‘Oo-oo, uvvy,’ she said, or words to that effect.
There was a dreadful inevitability about what Bobs was going to say next. The only hope was that he would wait till she was out of earshot, which of course he didn’t.
‘It’ll be a shipboard romance, I bet,’ he said.
She must have heard but, as she was already smiling her sad toothy smile and her expression didn’t change, it was hard to say whether she intended to acknowledge Bobs’s quip or whether she was still thanking him for carrying her bags. Climbing the steep gangway, I could hear Bobs’s endless chatter above the clanking of the cranes and the calling of the gulls, or not so much above as through. In fact, the cranes and the gulls seemed engaged in an admirable but doomed campaign to drown out or at least scramble him.
‘Must be all of 10,000 tons this boat, not like the old Queens, but they’ll look after you very well, it’s got two outdoor pools as well as the sauna and every kind of medical back-up, there’s even an on-board dentist, you must be down here, C–Deck, no, that seems to be the purser’s office, must be this way.’
‘Why does he have to mention the dentist? Have you seen her teeth?’
‘Oh that’s Bobs, Nobel Prize for tact,’ Helen said with a forgiving twinkle.
‘You can’t be really serious about him.’
‘Does being engaged sound serious? Or does it just sound old-fashioned?’
‘Engaged.’
Helen and I were sitting side by side on my bed in the cabin which was comfortable in a hospital sort of way: sickly picture of a bluebell wood on the wall, slithery pink chintzy eiderdown on the bed, pink quilted box for tissues with Heavensent’s motif, a rumpy cherub, pricked out on it.
‘You make it sound like a line in Private Lives or something,’ she said.
‘Bobs isn’t witty enough for a part in Private Lives.’
‘Well, anyway, that’s what we are. He wanted it, I mean, I said why don’t we just get married, but he thought his parents would prefer it if we were engaged first, though of course his mother’s dead and his father wouldn’t notice if Bobs said he was changing sex.’
‘You actually want to marry him?’
‘Mm.’
‘You can’t. I remember you saying just after he –’
‘That was then. I’m thirty years old now. It’s not the 1960s any more.’
‘Do you mean you’re old enough to decide for yourself or that –’
‘The biological clock is ticking on. Both.’
‘Even so . . .’
‘You think I could do better. Well, I can tell you, better isn’t better, or what looks like better isn’t. They lie all the time, sometimes they lie to themselves too, but they always lie to you.’
‘Who?’
>
‘Men, all the men I know anyway.’
‘And Bobs doesn’t lie?’
‘I don’t think so, not to me, so far anyway.’
She seemed to be near tears and I wasn’t so far off myself.
The imminent saying goodbye was partly to blame, and so perhaps was the gentle motion of the boat at anchor, not so gentle when another boat’s wash rocked us and the quilted box of Kleenex slid into my lap and I took the opportunity to pass her one.
‘Well, I agree you wouldn’t, for example, expect Tolly d’Amico to tell you the truth, but in fact he was surprisingly frank about most things.’
‘About his wife and three children in Harold Hill? Or about his prison sentence?’ she said sharply.
‘But surely you took up with him because, or partly because he had this air of criminal mystery.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Yes. You almost said so to me once.’
She gave me an icy stare.
‘I don’t remember saying anything of the sort, and even if I did sort of half-think that he might have been as much of a villain as he claimed to be, I thought he would have only been inside for fraud or something.’
‘And –’
‘I didn’t think he had been a pimp.’
‘That’s worse?’
‘Much worse and if you can’t see it I can’t see much point in carrying on this conversation.’
‘I’m sorry, of course I see it’s horrible.’
‘He did five years. At one time, he had four girls running for him, or whatever the phrase is. I got a journalist to look it up in a cuttings library. Tolly wasn’t even ashamed enough to change his name.’
‘So all the time he was letting us think he was just a dear old property swindler, you were suspecting he wasn’t.’
‘Well, I was right.’
‘And Dodo, how has he betrayed your childlike trust? What’s his dark secret?’
‘It’s not funny.’
‘I didn’t say it was.’
‘You sound very bitter,’ she said.
‘You seem to be the bitter one.’
‘Well, I have plenty of reasons to be.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘No you don’t know, not all of them.’
‘Well, tell me then.’
‘I can’t.’
‘What do you mean, why can’t you tell me?’
‘I can’t tell you is what I meant. No, I can’t tell anybody in fact. Look, it’s time we were going.’
She got up and pulled on her short navy-blue coat, which had a merchant-marine look about it, and shook out her fair hair with that motion of a curtain swirling in the breeze which always meant she was moving on. And once again I had that same feeling I had had for her ever since we first met, which was not at all like the feeling I have had for anyone else before or since, not desire exactly, though not unmixed with desire, but a sense that she was at the centre of life, or of what life ought to be, not because she was a moral example (I could think of several cases where I couldn’t say she had done the right thing) but because she had a moral seriousness attached to her in some way, not as a weight or burden, more like a fragrance. Could seriousness be a fragrance? What was seriousness anyway? Going on at things seemed to be the way most people thought of it, not holding back or stopping half-way for second thoughts or a cigarette. Was that always so admirable? Somehow it wasn’t a topic I could discuss with Helen. I suddenly thought how much I would have liked to see her father again and have this sort of conversation with him.
These tired and teasing thoughts were brought to an end by a brisk rap on the door. Bobs.
‘I’ve bedded Mrs Fitch down. She’s a widow. Husband worked for BP, large bald man like Boris Karloff. Showed me his photograph.’
Bobs looked merchant-marine, too, with his blazer and general briskness. Perhaps he and Helen were a suitable couple after all, and the sooner they settled down together the better for them and everyone else. Deep fatigue swept over me as though I had swallowed some opiate shortly after boarding the Zephyr and I found it hard even to follow them up the companionway and wave goodbye from the deck.
As the hooter sounded, my legs began to give under me and I had to hold on to the railing with one hand while making a bravura farewell with the other.
Soon I was swaddled in the Zephyr’s pink sheets, my nostrils appeased by the scent of Lavender Haze sprayed over the bed. Even the gentle hum of the engines beginning to make way conspired to shoo me off to sleep, one of those sweet and utter sleeps that you awake from bewildered, tumbled back into a world so strange and unsought that you are not sure you aren’t still in dreamland. The first sound was the oddest, seagulls again or still. Did they follow the ship the whole way across the Atlantic? Surely it wasn’t possible to have slept through the whole voyage, that would be a feat of narcolepsy beyond even me. But seagulls – there was no doubt about it. They had to be investigated. I tumbled out of the pink sheets, put on a jersey and trousers and deck shoes and clattered up the stairs, feeling like a hand reluctantly taking up his watch.
The most peculiar thing. Thick mist wet against my cheek. Half an hour or so after dawn. But there was no sign of the sun, only the great swathes of fog rolling around the fuchsia funnel and the radio masts. Even so, I could see that the ship was nosing its way up some kind of channel with grey-green banks on either side and not so far away. The river or estuary if that was what it was seemed hardly wide enough to contain the great liner which was moving with the utmost caution. Out of the gloom loomed a tower on a low cliff. Or was it an island or an outcrop of rock in the water? A lighthouse perhaps, but it was not lit, and as we came closer, I could see that it was a tower and the top of it was ruined. The scene was so deadly quiet, the mist so deceiving, that I felt deranged and wondered whether this might be a late add-on to my dream. Or had we lost our way and were just about to go aground on some rocky inlet, in Brittany perhaps? Yet our course seemed deliberate and there was no sign of panic.
For another half-hour or so, I stood leaning over the rail shivering a little, feeling my skin tremble against rough wool. Then the engines shut down and there was nothing but the silence on the water until it was broken by the rattle and clank of the anchor chain paying out. Silence again when the anchor was down. It seemed we might be there for ever hovering in these misty waters.
Then faintly, from far ahead of us, came the puttering of some engine and, a long time later, so long that it might have been a different engine, a big launch almost the size of a trawler crept out of the mist towards me. As the launch came alongside our lower decks and men rushed forward to make her fast, I could see her varnished upper deck gleaming in the wet dawn. The deck was half-hidden by the huge pile of luggage: great matching leather suitcases shining with the wet on them, then a matching set of fashion luggage in assorted shapes with brocade patterns; several long cases for dresses, two flat gun-cases of bruised apple-green canvas with battered leather corners, clumpy vanity cases, hat boxes, golf bags with the sheen of young calves and long floppy bags in light canvas concealing who knew what implements of pleasure – polo sticks, skis, surfboards?
Men in pink jerseys, more Heavensent livery, began to haul these exquisite impedimenta on to a conveyor belt slung across to D deck. I had just heard the purring of the belt as it started up, when I became aware that I was not the only spectator. Standing to one side of the mound of luggage in the launch, and bracing himself against its slopping from side to side was a huge man in a great overcoat which must have demanded the skins of a whole herd of some shaggy Alpine creature. He was joined after a couple of minutes by a woman, much slighter but wearing a coat taken from some other luckless mammals. Her hair was done in a brindled queue, much the same colour as her coat.
Even in that uncertain dawn there was no mistaking the Wilmots. Where had they come from? How and why had they made this rendezvous with the Zephyr? Where the hell, in any case, were we? The initial diagnosis, tha
t my trembling body was in reality still asleep and that this strange detour of the Zephyr was a figment of the last eye-flickers of that profound slumber, that diagnosis seemed to have a lot to be said for it.
Even in a dream, though, you can wave, in fact dreamers do a good deal of waving as well as drowning, so I leant over the rail and waved with some zest at the goat-coated duo. But I was high above them and the mist was thick and in any case I must have been less easy to identify than they were, so Dodo Wilmot looking up gave me only a perfunctory unrecognising flop of his great paw and Tucker who was busy counting her suitcases as they burbled along the conveyor belt didn’t look up at all.
After the cases were all gone into our boat, the two of them stood for a moment or two, like worshippers not wishing to show irreverent haste at the end of the service, then moved out of sight towards the gangway at the back of the launch. I too lingered at my look-out post watching the mist clear from this strange channel, before going to look for the Wilmots or breakfast whichever came first.
It was not until I was coming out of the dining-room that I saw them standing by the rail. He was pointing something out to her and she was smoothing her hair with one hand. The sun was out now behind them so that it was from their outline rather than their faces that I recognised them and only when they came towards the door into the passage where I was standing that I saw that it was not his wife Tucker that he had with him but Jane Stilwell.
‘Well, hi and hallo, isn’t this great,’ Dodo said.
All Jane said was ‘You’ and clapped her hand to her mouth as violently as though her teeth would have fallen out if she hadn’t. She probably meant to show astonishment or delight or both but the effect was more like unashamed panic and when she skipped over the brass threshold to embrace me she collapsed into my arms like a shot bird.
Well, well,’ Dodo said. You come aboard at Southampton?’
‘Yes,’ I said, through a mouthful of mussed-up copper hair.
‘We were going to catch the plane at Shannon but I thought to myself, what the hell’s the point of owning a boat if you can’t holler for her. Besides, the Queens always used to drop by here, so I thought why not my little cockleshell? This is one hell of a fun place, you know that. If you’re looking for a place to honeymoon, this is it. We had a couple of days in Kildare with John and Ricki Huston, then we came on down to Ballybunion. I played that Sahara hole every which way, never did no better than a bogey.’
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