‘It was never like this on the old Cunard ships. If you wanted to talk to the purser, you went to the purser’s office.’
‘Oh you are out of date, dear. Everyone has to tell you who they are nowadays.’
‘And their bust size and why they don’t get on with their daughter-in-law and what’s wrong with them down there.’
‘. . . and Dr Alfred H. Guderian, one of the finest physicians it has been my good fortune to claim as a friend. Many of you will have met him already. By the end of this trip, I guarantee you’ll want to have him on your medical team till hell freezes over. Great to have you aboard, Alfred.’
Dr Guderian rose from his seat at the captain’s table under the clock in the shape of a golden sunburst. For a moment he remained motionless, then his imperial eye swept the room before he swooped into a bow, which was both deep and stiff and expressive of the deepest reverence.
It was hard to say whether he had intended this to be all but Dodo wanted more.
‘Alfred, may I persuade you to share just a little of your philosophy with us tonight, I know it would be much appreciated and to many of us it would be a great comfort.’
Dr Guderian mimed being startled, embarrassed, at a loss, utterly ambushed by this request. He bowed again, just his head this time, to show that he was striving to overcome this éblouissement and to collect his thoughts.
‘Waldo, you are too kind and I am not at all sure that these wonderful people, our shipmates’ – he flung his arms wide with wrists oddly bent, giving the impression rather of an angler indicating the size of his catch than of the warm embracing motion he must have intended – ‘I am not by any means confident that they will thank you for it. But you are my commanding officer, my captain, and I must obey orders.’
Again he cast his sloe-dark eyes around the great low room, from the wan and grizzled heads of the passengers to the rudely pink cherubs chasing each other in and out of the lime-green swags along the walls. The clatter of cutlery was hushed, the asparagus lay limp in its puddle of yellow mayonnaise.
‘Many years ago in France when the Palace of Versailles was at its glittering zenith,’ was how he began, ‘the King had a personal physician, a man of the greatest eminence. His position was glorious, but it was also precarious, for if he failed to cure the King of whatever ailed him, there were many other eminent physicians who would be happy to take his place. Now the King we are speaking of, Louis Quinze, was in general a healthy, easygoing fellow. He was happy with the Queen, he was happy with his mistress, the good Madame de Pompadour. But as the years went by, the King encountered a problem. It was a common problem, one shared no doubt by many of his subjects. He found that he could no longer pursue the pleasures of love with the same ardour that he had taken for granted since the age of fifteen. Indeed, on many a night, he found himself incapable of pursuing them at all. This was an embarrassment, an indignity not to be tolerated. He sent for the Doctor, who told His Majesty that it was nothing, a mere indisposition that would soon be righted. Meanwhile, he prescribed a mild infusion of mandrake root, a modest draught of ginger and fig-water. Nothing worked, matters went from bad to worse. The Queen was affronted, Madame de Pompadour was distraught. The doctor prescribed a little salad of oysters and saffron. There was no response. In his despair, the King’s eye alighted upon a young Irish girl, a certain Mademoiselle O’Murphy. Inquiries were made. The girl was agreeable, the mother was delighted. Mamzelle O’Murphy was smuggled in by the usual back door. And in the morning, the King was beside himself with joy. I am cured, the King is himself again, but tell me, Doctor, which was it wrought the miracle? Was it the oysters or the mandrake root? Neither, Sire, replied the honest doctor, it was your new petite amie, it was Mamzelle O’Murphy you have to thank, for change, sire, is the greatest aphrodisiac of them all. And with the greatest respect, ladies and gentlemen, that is the lesson I venture to offer you this evening. But I do not need to teach it you, for you have already learnt it yourselves. A change is as good as a rest, you say in England, and on the good ship Zephyr a change is a rest. And to you who know how much wisdom resides in that simple phrase, I give you a little toast to finish with: To a change of air!’
He raised his glass with the solemnity of a priest elevating the Host and sank it with a toss of his head so passionate that he seemed on the verge of throwing the empty glass over his shoulder Cossack-style. There was a rather ragged response from the passengers, though not from me. The story of the King’s impotence had been a favourite of Dr Maintenon-Smith’s. I was glad to hear it again after so long an interval, though not sure whether it was entirely suitable for the present audience. Mrs Perse agreed.
‘Hit quite the wrong note. We don’t want to be reminded of that sort of thing at our age. Anyway, he’s talking nonsense. It’s a question of the blood supply. My husband had the same trouble as soon as his blood pressure went up. I suppose he thinks it’s all in the mind. He wouldn’t if he saw my X-rays.’
‘Cynthia,’ Mrs Fitch interjected, ‘I think he was just trying to cheer us up a bit. Anyway, there is a nervous factor in some of these complaints, isn’t there?’
‘Claptrap,’ Mrs Perse said and returned to poking at her asparagus before pushing it away in a final gesture of rejection.
Was it fancy, or had Dr Guderian’s toast sent a fretful unease skittering throughout the dining-room? I noticed several plates being pushed away like Mrs Perse’s and the sound of the talk seemed to ricochet off the low ceiling in a jerky intermittent way, like a radio with a fading battery. How odd that a Napoleonic figure who put so much into the effect he made should be such a poor judge of his audience, but then Napoleonic figures were always like that, trembling on the edge of embarrassment and bad taste. Perhaps it was just that awkward edge to their discourse which touched some vulnerable part of their audience’s souls, and so seduced not only those people who you would have guessed would be suckers for a demagogue, but also those who regarded themselves as cool and fastidious but who succumbed all the same, muttering how vulgar it all was even as they succumbed. Perhaps what was wrong with Dr Guderian was that he wasn’t quite embarrassing enough.
‘Thank you, Alfred, for those fine words: they will be an inspiration to us in the days ahead, and now it only remains for me to announce the winner of today’s Gone-with-the-Wind competition. Remember, you have to estimate the distance travelled by the Zephyr in nautical miles only.’
I could tell that Dodo shared the general unease generated by the Doctor’s toast.
‘There’s something sinister about that man,’ Mrs Perse hissed at me.
‘You mean he’s even creepier than other doctors?’
‘No, not the doctor, your friend Mr Wilmot. He’s not what he seems.’
‘What do you think he seems?’
‘Well, he wants to seem a genial, friendly sort of American, but he isn’t. He’s a phoney.’
The next day was foggy. Out on the upper deck, the fog was so thick I couldn’t see the radio mast. It was thick and wet in the throat, a change of air all right and one that penetrated to the lower decks, so that as I padded along the soft carpeting of C Deck, the aisle was full of noises, quick hacking coughs, low keening moans, heavy wheezings which seemed to gather themselves into a huge hoarse gulp and then dwindle into shorter spasms. Sometimes the spasms strung themselves together into what sounded like a snatch of conversation until they separated again into the long strangulated uh-hurrrs of a morning asthma attack. In fact, there was little or no talk to be heard, most of the passengers having more urgent things to do with their lungs.
Even inside my cabin, the same dismal sounds came vibrating through the thin walls, so that I could not help thinking of the rows of fellow-inmates rolling themselves up in their bedclothes or sitting straight up in armchairs with rugs over their knees.
The following morning the fog was thicker still but I could not stand any more of Anna Karenina or of the stertorous coughing and spluttering around me and I went up
on deck quite early. The place was deserted and quiet as a funeral. Even the scud of the waves and the hum of the engines were muffled by the fog. Now and then there was a strange noise, half-way between a squeak and a sob, repeated, convulsive. Hard to tell whether it was a bird or a human being or some wire scraping against something. Then at the far end, coming out of the door leading to the staterooms, I saw a large man who seemed to be dragging a smaller figure, probably a woman, half-supporting her as the two of them stumbled along the deck. I was almost sure it was Dodo and Jane, but why was she leaning on him so heavily? Had she sprained her ankle? As they turned the corner, I caught sight of the shape of the brindled queue, though not its colour which was muted by the grey-green-white fog, and I saw the massive back of his head, but there seemed something private about them – perhaps it was just that they were wrapped in the fog. It would have felt wrong, intrusive to pursue them and loom out of the mist at them like a spectre.
Then behind them coming out of the same door, I saw a third figure scurrying after them, another woman holding something flapping, a wrap perhaps, or was it her scurrying run that made the bundle seem to flap? She was trying to catch them up, give them something they had forgotten. This time there was no mistake. The lollopy run like a foal’s, with the legs like sticks thrown out as though to flick mud off them, this, no doubt about it, was Jane running as she had run down to misplace her bet on the race that had been fixed. She too disappeared round the corner, leaving me alone on the deck, bewildered. Who then was the other woman? Couldn’t be, yet how could it not be? Had they actually brought Tucker with them on this, well, if it was not a honeymoon cruise it was as close as made no difference?
It was hard to say how long I stood there with my hand resting on the cold polished wood of the railing, but I began to shiver under my muffler and light dimpled raincoat, the sort Harold Wilson had worn, and it occurred to me that it was time to move before they came round the lifeboat-davit on the other side. But I had left it too late and there they were, the three of them, now moving, swaying really, along the deck towards me with the smaller wrynecked limping one between the other two, held up by their linked arms.
I could not see her face which was enveloped in a voluminous grey scarf and in any case her head was nuzzled down into Dodo’s chest. He passed by unseeing, without a word, which seemed odd until I noticed how much in the shadow of the lifeboat I was standing and remembered how thick the fog was. But as they went on down the deck, Jane cast a backward glance, twisting her head abruptly like someone trying to catch a child trying to creep up on her in a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. And it was clear she had seen me. I am not sure how I knew, perhaps an extra jerk of the head, or did her mouth fall open for an instant as if she was about to call out to me but had thought better of it? Then, in only an instant or two, they were gone into the fog again and I went below.
It was the last day of the voyage and in the afternoon the shore birds began to mew in the rigging and passengers gathered along the railing to see if they could catch the first glimpse of Long Island, but the fog was too thick.
I lay low in my cabin hoping that somehow Dodo and Jane would leave me alone until I could get off this terrible boat and leave them to their ghastly saga. But that was too much to hope for and the little knock at the door, an uncertain but repeated rat-tat, not a steward’s knock, came with a dreadful inevitability shortly after five o’clock.
‘There you are,’ Jane said, as though it was a brilliant piece of detection to track me down to my cabin. ‘What’s all that cottonwool for?’
‘I’m making a beard, for the fancy-dress tonight. I’m going as Neptune.’
‘Oh isn’t that just like you, you just carry on regardless. It’s the British thing to do, isn’t it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t need to talk to me like that. I rather think, don’t you, that it’s you who owe me an explanation.’
‘Is it? What am I supposed to be explaining?’
‘Why you were spying on us this morning?’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘There’s no point in pretending you weren’t. I saw you when I came out on deck and I thought you might have the decency to disappear by the time we came back round. But there you were, skulking under that lifeboat like a private eye.’
‘Is that what you’ve come here to tell me?’
‘No, of course it isn’t. But it would have been much better if you hadn’t –’
‘What are you doing, what is all this?’ I burst out, suddenly distraught and angry after brooding by myself for so long.
‘You see, you wouldn’t have needed to know anyway, nor would anyone, not for a long time until she was much better and could look after herself. We just wanted to get her back home, you know, quietly.’
Jane was sitting there on the little pink chair leaning forward making eager emphatic gestures with her hands as though she was conducting an orchestra of dwarfs in front of her. I was still half-lolling on my bed with the fringe of cottonwool now firmly stuck to my chin.
‘So now,’ she sighed, ‘I’ll just have to tell you the story, but you must promise, really promise to keep it to yourself. We have been friends so long that I think that I can ask you that much, don’t you. Please.’
I nodded, but so minimally that she said please again and I said yes all right, but wishing I was several light years away.
‘Well, you know how Dodo and I . . . came together. He asked me over to Turkey Creek after John died to tell me about how it happened and talk over old times, and Tucker was down in Corpus Christi with her aunt and anyway she was having this thing with the tennis coach already, I know she was, so one thing led to another, ha’ – she gave a little short laugh to acknowledge the cliché – ‘and there we were and we knew it wasn’t just a passing thing, I don’t know how but we just knew. So I went back to New York to see Brainerd and Timmy who was just off to Cornell and Tucker came back from Corpus and I don’t know how she found out but she did – Dodo’s not very smart really – and then he said what about the tennis coach and they had a bit of a spat but after that she was really very empathetic and said yes, well, perhaps they had come to the end of the road, and she went off to Reno with him like a lamb and they even spent a couple of days together in Vegas in memory of old times, then when they got home to sort out stuff and he went off to look at the horses she went off to his sporting room and found the old blunderbuss that he uses for shooting dove, and boom – but she didn’t put it to her forehead firmly enough and she didn’t do the job, only blasted part of the frontal lobe, just there.’
She raised her hand to her forehead to show the area, and the likeness between the two of them seemed to have some grim significance in the telling of the story, as though she had been chosen to re-enact the disaster because of her similarity to the victim.
‘She’s coming through quite well, her walking’s not good – well, you saw that – and she can’t see at all and she weeps the whole time, can’t bear for to meet anybody, that’s why we take her for walks when there’s nobody else about. It’s so sad.’
Her voice had lost its eagerness, and at the end she sounded as if she was speaking of some distant misfortune that had happened to someone she knew only slightly.
‘But why are you dragging her round the world with you? Wouldn’t she be better off at home resting?’
‘Oh there’s a great plastic surgeon in Harley Street she just had to see and we thought too the trip would do her good. And the Hustons found us a very peaceful home run by nuns outside Mullingar. Besides, there are a lot of other folks on board who are in the same boat, ha’ – she laughed again. Then she looked at me, quite challengingly.
‘So what do you say to that? One helluva mess, huh?’
I nodded.
‘Is that all you can do, just nod? Is that – oh the hell with it. All I ask is just keep it to yourself. Am I wrong or do you owe me for something or other? Don’t tell her anyway,
that little Goldilocks of yours, that I could not tolerate.’
She rose shooting me a glance dripping with dislike and left the room.
The gum had begun to tighten the skin around my chin and the cottonwool was tickling my nostrils. The green blanket I had borrowed from one of the clinic nurses was much too heavy to wear all evening. It would be crazy to go to the fancy-dress party. There would be half a dozen Neptunes there already.
Much more tempting to lie in bed and think about suicide. Or attempted suicide which was the really unnerving thought. The successful suicide – successful, what an odd word to use, but was there a better one, so keen are we to congratulate ourselves on bringing off anything, that we instinctively leave a little tingle of approval around the adjective, however misguided the thing we are attempting – the successful suicide, not being that common, had a certain grandeur. The ripples of pain it left behind would go on widening for a lifetime, perhaps longer, a stone cruelly chucked in the gene pool. Suicide in its awful way was an achievement. Martin Hardress would be remembered for years like someone who has scored a goal in some complicated variant of football where the rules make it almost impossible. But all around there were unsuccessful entrants, some barely getting beyond the half-way line, like Jane herself stumbling through the shallows or Black trying to throw himself off the edge of the quarry but too drunk to find the right ledge; some only a pill or an inch away from success, like Bobs or now Tucker, saved, if saved was the word, by incompetence or perhaps some tiny vestigial survival instinct. But all lapped in misery, so that if you were to look at the world properly suicide was not some extraordinary sight, like a spectacular waterfall, but simply the seventh wave in the daily ebb and flow of unhappiness, the one that happened to crash on the rocks.
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