A Death on the Ocean Wave

by Tim Heald

  ‘Quite,’ said Tudor, bearing in mind the old adage about ceasing to dig when you’d created a deep hole.

  They were saved from further embarrassment by Mandy Goldslinger ringing a handbell.

  ‘Hi, ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys,’ she shouted. ‘Welcome aboard the good ship Duchess. I’m your Cruise Director Mandy and we’re going to have ourselves a ball together during the next few days. However before we do it’s my wonderful job to introduce our wonderful captain so that he can introduce y’all to his wonderful crew. I know some of you have sailed on this great ship before and so you’ll know what a truly great captain we’re privileged to have at the helm. Those of you who are on board for the first time are privileged to have the opportunity of finding out what true captaincy really is. So without more ado, let me present the finest skipper on the seven seas, the pride and joy of Her Majesty’s Merchant Navy, the one and only, irreplaceable, irresistible Captain Samuel Hardy.’

  Saying which she set down her bell on the table at her side and clapped her hands in a vigorous invitation to everyone else to do the same. Behind her on stage the ship’s orchestra who had reappeared as if by magic played a few jaunty bars of ‘Rule Britannia’ and the Master, preening his elegant moustaches in a gesture which not even the simplest passenger could have mistaken for modesty, acknowledged the plaudits of the multitude before gesturing for silence, as if the applause was all too much for him.

  ‘Welcome, ladies and gentleman, to the finest ship afloat,’ he began and continued in a spirit of effusive bonhomie for a minute or two before introducing Staff Captain Donaldson, the Chief Engineer, the Purser, the Head Housekeeper, the Executive Chef and others, all of whom smiled and waved and were rewarded by enthusiastic clapping and even the occasional unexpected wolf-whistle.

  Finally, when he had done, the Master raised his glass, and said, ‘As they say on the other side of the English Channel, Bon Voyage! I wish you all a calm passage and a safe arrival in New York City.’

  Tudor shrugged at his pretty protégé.

  ‘Tempting fate a bit wouldn’t you say?’ he asked softly.

  ‘I’d say so,’ she replied. ‘What do you imagine the captain said to the passengers when the Titanic set sail?’

  ‘Much the same, I imagine,’ said Tudor.

  ‘You bet,’ she said.

  Chapter Four

  Elizabeth Burney shivered on the spiral staircase leading to the Chatsworth Restaurant and pulled her Tasmanian Trefusis stole tight about her shoulders.

  ‘I feel like I’m in the cast of an Agatha Christie. Death on the Nile maybe,’ she said. ‘Is it always like this?’

  ‘ ‘As if’, not ‘like’ if you don’t mind,’ he said pedantically.

  ‘Oh, for f***’s sake,’ she said, ‘Can you do content not context and answer the question?’

  Tudor winced. He knew he had fuddy-duddy tendencies.

  ‘Cruise ships are natural settings for Agatha Christie type mysteries,’ he said, in pedagogic mode. ‘In some respects you could argue that the modern cruise ship is the conscious equivalent of the twentieth-century house-party. Or at least that’s what it aspires to. Equally you could say that ships like the Duchess are deliberately trying to ape the great transatlantic passenger liners of the same period. The passengers reflect this. So yes.’

  ‘So yes,’ she mimicked, giggling lightly, ‘it’s like being on stage for a matinee of The Mousetrap.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know what you mean. Cruising’s a bit like that.’

  She giggled again and was still smiling when they entered the dining room which was doing its best to live up to its name. Seeing the pastiche oil paintings on the panelled walls Tudor remembered a quip about a Duke of Devonshire at his stately pile selling off old masters to pay for young mistresses. These paintings were ersatz old masters unlike the real duke’s paintings in the real Chatsworth and like the room itself they were part of a charade or pantomime. This was part of the essence of cruising. The experience involved a voluntary suspension of disbelief. For the duration of the voyage passengers entered a world of fantasy and make-believe. For most of them this was entirely agreeable. For some, some of the time, it was not.

  This was now the case for Dr Tudor Cornwall who found himself obliged to dine at a table for four with Sir Goronwy and Lady Watkyn. This was Tudor’s idea of purgatory. Sir Goronwy droned on through the prawn cocktail, droned on through the brownish steak Diane, droned on through the Black Forest gateau and droned on through the coffee and petits fours. Whenever the drone seemed to stop in order to allow the speaker a pause for breath, Lady Watkyn managed to get in a sycophantic coda which prevented either Tudor or Elizabeth putting an end to what represented the verbal equivalent of a record-breaking marathon snooker break.

  In one way or another Watkyn droned on about himself. As a professional Welshman he possessed all the verbosity of the most long-winded Methodist preacher but without the redeeming belief in the Almighty. As far as Sir Goronwy Watkyn was concerned there was only one God and that was Sir Goronwy Watkyn. He would have said that his conversation – he would never have accepted that it was actually a monologue – ranged far and wide. In a sense this was true for, beginning with crime fiction, its origins, its history, its current strengths and weaknesses he rabbited on through politics from his own parish in the Marches just outside Montgomery, to Welsh politics – with special reference to the Plaid – British politics, European politics and global politics. He could do terrorism, cricket, crochet, crosswords. You name it. His knowledge may not have run very deep but it ran impossibly wide. And every topic he covered had an ill-concealed subtext which was, of course, Sir Goronwy Watkyn. You might think that, for instance, he was delivering a detailed and dispassionate account of British military operations in Iraq, but before long he himself would make an entrance. Sometimes he would appear as a name-dropping British Council lecturer, sometimes as a military expert who had done national service in the Royal Welch Fusiliers; sometimes as a young man who had once canoed up the Euphrates, perhaps as an author who had once set a novel in Biblical Babylon. It was, in Tudor’s opinion, self-opinionated and self-obsessed tripe. Impressive in its way, rather like a model of the Empire State building made entirely of matchsticks, or the world’s biggest Cornish pasty, but tripe nonetheless. The dreaded Myfanwy’s breathy little encomia filled the tiny silences like the pitter-patter of confetti. ‘So right, darling... so very, very right... that was the time the Prime Minister phoned to ask... Watty’s laver bread is the best in the whole of Wales.’ And so on.

  It was said of him that if he simply dropped God’s name then all was normal. Thus when Sir Goronwy confided, ‘I was walking down to the club and happened to bump into God. Had a most interesting chat,’ that was OK. The time to worry was when he said, ‘I was walking down to the club when I bumped into Goronwy Watkyn.’ That was when you knew you were in trouble and Goronwy was due for one of his periodic periods in the bin.

  After a while Tudor started to play a game of guessing how many times the old wind-bag would use the words ‘I’ or ‘me’ in the next five minutes. The incidence of both was astonishingly high and increased noticeably in proportion to the ingestion of alcohol which was itself significant. Riviera Shipping might have been conservative on the food lines but it was generous with the claret.

  Mandy Goldslinger was at a table with two gentlemen hosts and the Baltic classical guitarist. They seemed to be having a much better time than the Cornwall-Watkyn table. There was evidence of four-way conversation, story-telling, jokes and even laughter. The two boys and two girls of the celebrity, all-singing, all-dancing, all-smiling cabaret team of whom no one on board had previously heard, were evidently enjoying an incestuous luv-in. Mandy’s deputy, an androgynous wet-behind-the-ears Yorkshire tyke, was hosting a ventriloquist, the water-colour teacher and the computer lecturer. And so on. There were about thirty diners in all.

  Just as Tudor was floating into a Goronwy-induc
ed miasma of total inattention and ennui he heard a Watkynism which brought him suddenly back to something approaching life.

  ‘Blah... blah... Goronwyblah... bach... hwyl... aberblah... blahgynolwyn... blah... watkynblah... last voyage of the Duchess.’

  Tudor reacted like a schnauzer stung by a wasp.

  ‘Last voyage of the Duchess?’ he repeated, fumbling his way out of half-asleep.

  ‘Last voyage of the Duchess, boyo,’ said the Welsh knight, taking a long sip of the Australian sticky with which Riviera Shipping had rounded off their largesse. ‘The old girl’s swansong. At least the last voyage in these particular colours. Dare say she’ll re-emerge as a hospital ship for the Swiss Navy or a nautical knocking shop for the dictator in some banana republic. Or a Central African kingdom. There’s a public-school educated emperor with a lot of wives in Equatorial Bongo-Bongo land who might just about fit the bill. In any event’ – he sipped again, fleshy lips kissing the glass with an almost lascivious caress – ‘it’s the last time you and I will tread the boards of these particular decks.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Tudor, experiencing a frisson of anticipatory alarm. He was beginning to have a bad feeling about this trip.

  ‘This Oz Auslese is warming to the cockles of my old Celtic heart,’ said the theatrical old crime writer. ‘Sure? Nothing’s sure in life. That’s the only certainty about our drab existence wouldn’t you say? Dylan Thomas has a memorable passage about madness and sanity, but alas I’ve forgotten it. Ah Dylan, Dylan. How I miss the dear darling boy...’

  ‘I remember the line perfectly,’ said Tudor, sharply, for he was vexed.

  Sir Goronwy shot him a threatened look from under beetling white eyebrows. The eyes were unfocused in a fuddled fashion.

  ‘How did you know?’ he asked tetchily.

  ‘One does,’ said Tudor, matching the older man’s bad temper with his own. ‘And how come too that you knew that this was the Duchess’s last voyage with Riviera?’

  Sir Goronwy smiled elliptically.

  ‘As you suggest,’ he said, ‘there are things that one simply knows as if by osmosis, picked up on the ether, plucked from the wings of gossip, born to one’s ears on the silvery threads of ethereal whispers from one knows not where.’

  ‘Someone told you late one night and you’ve forgotten who,’ said Tudor.

  The old fraud was not to be easily riled.

  ‘I never reveal my sources save in works of genuine written scholarship,’ said Sir Goronwy. ‘In verbal communication seldom if ever. Confidences are not to be betrayed but evidence must be acknowledged. My dear old father, the Reverend Ebenezer Watkyn of Abergynolwyn, of whom you may have heard me speak, was a past master of the telling reference, the learned footnote, the bibliophiliac bibliography, in short of knowledge lightly worn yet properly acknowledged.’ He paused, breathless at last and waved at a passing waiter for more dessert wine.

  ‘Ebenezer, Goronwy’s da, was a fine man,’ said Lady Watkyn, quick as a flash, ‘And a wonderful preacher. Held his congregations in the palm of his hand he did, just as if they’d been a lump of dough and they about to be baked into a loaf of bread and fed with the fishes, just as the Good Book tells us.’

  It was apparent to Tudor and to Elizabeth Burney that Sir Goronwy was not the only Watkyn the worse for wear alcoholically speaking.

  Tudor was wondering whether to go through the charade of intelligent conversation when the Cruise Director shimmered across clanking with costume jewellery and gleaming all over.

  ‘Dahling,’ she said breathily, ‘would you mind playing musical chairs so that I can sit with these gorgeous people?’

  Elizabeth Burney regarded this as a virtually divine intervention and did as she was asked with an alacrity which might have been considered impolite even by the stone cold sober. Sir Goronwy and Lady Watkyn however seemed barely to notice but just continued their seamless droning duet. This was, reflected Tudor, as dispassionately as he was able, a remarkable conversational accomplishment – the sort of thing that ought to go into the Guinness Book of Records alongside Gyles Brandreth’s longest ever after-dinner speech.

  ‘What’s all this,’ he hissed, ignoring the Welsh, ‘about the Duchess being sold? On her last voyage in Riviera colours I’m reliably informed.’

  ‘Reliable, sweetie?’ Mandy Goldslinger smiled a sceptical smile implying that this was not even mere gossip but a positive untruth. She could have been right for there was not much to do with Riviera Shipping that Mandy did not know. Cruise Director was a title that did her far less than justice.

  ‘It came from the horse’s mouth,’ said Tudor. ‘At this very table. Sir Goronwy himself, no less.’

  At the mention of his name the Welsh knight came to an unprecedented pause and the slack of his jaw was not, for once, taken up by his harpist harpy wife.

  ‘You’re not taking my name in vain I trust. Very verily, all is vanity,’ he said theatrically and evidently rather pleased with a joke which only he and his wife seemed to understand.

  ‘Not in the least,’ said Tudor pleasantly. ‘I was simply confirming with Mandy here what you told me earlier about this being the last voyage of the MV Duchess.’

  ‘I always think of the dear thing as the RMS Duchess though I suppose she carries no mailbags these days,’ said Sir Goronwy. ‘The Royal Mail in any case no longer being as regal as it was in the days when the postman rang twice and always came on time. New Labour is little more than republicanism in sheep’s clothing though the concept is insulting to sheep, which is as sacred to my nation as the leek or the daffodil.’

  Some of Tudor’s best friends, Tudor reflected, were Welsh. Indeed as his name suggested he had plenty of Celtic blood himself. He did not, however, wish to claim kinship with the Watkyns.

  Mandy Goldslinger cut through this Celtic cackle like a knife through low cholesterol health spread.

  ‘If Riviera are selling,’ she said with an air of ill-defined menace, ‘then who, I would like to know, is buying? Riviera, as you know, is owned by Atlantic and Pacific, which in turn is owned by Galactic and Global which means, effectively, that there is no one else in the market.’

  Sir Goronwy smiled saliverly.

  ‘I’m told that the two most likely purchasers are both on board,’ he said, ‘and already at daggers drawn. It wouldn’t surprise me if we had some dramatic events to entertain us before we arrive in New York.’

  He gave a knowing wink and a portentous belch and seeing that his glass was empty rose unsteadily to go in search of a refill.

  Chapter Five

  They had a good day in Cork.

  Had Tudor been a more flippant, Wodehousian figure, he might have described it as ‘an absolute corker’ or ‘jolly corking run-ashore,’ but being the man he was he simply said, that evening when they were back on board nursing a couple of Boris the Barman’s lethal but delicious cocktails, ‘I rather enjoyed today.’

  Elizabeth, who was beginning to read her supervisor as well as he would like to think he read her, said succinctly, ‘Me too.’

  Until a few months earlier she had barely been out of Tasmania and then only to the Australian mainland and, just once, to New Zealand on a hiking holiday. Coming to England she had been amazed at how like her own homeland it was, despite being on the other side of the planet. She knew the history and understood how the affinities had arisen but she was nevertheless viscerally amazed at having travelled so many thousands of miles to end up, nearly, exactly where she had begun.

  Yet as she settled in she found that the superficial similarities of cricket and culture, custom and convention were exactly that – superficial. There were profound differences of language and idiom; a pervasive defeatism where she had grown up with optimism and the idea of ‘can do’. She felt she had grown up in a place which lived outdoors and where anything was possible. Now she was in a country with low horizons where there was nearly always some sort of bureaucratic regulation that prevented you doing anything inte
resting or unusual.

  She loved being in England because of its complexity and its history. Life in Wessex, even at its not particularly good university, had a texture that was missing in the breezy, nonchalant, new land of her youth.

  And now Ireland. She had been told that Cork was not the true Ireland but that it was a place apart: Corcaigh – she was irritated by the Gaelic sub-title to everything from road-signs to picture postcards especially the curlicued typeface which she thought pretentious and naff. This didn’t stop her and her boss buying postcards – views of tiny typical whitewashed cottages with donkeys. They wrote messages on them for folks back home in a dark pub where they drank cold black Guinness and marvelled at the efficacy of the recent smoking ban which seemed to have been obeyed with remarkable un-Irish alacrity. The jukebox played fiddle and squeezebox folk songs of vaguely Republican sentiments. Afterwards they moved to a brighter less sepulchral pub and lunched off big meaty mutton chops and colcannon with more Guinness to drink followed, greatly daring, by an Irish coffee heavily impregnated with Tullamore Dew and with the cream correctly unwhipped and poured over the back of a silver spoon so that it sat fat and mildly yellow on top of the Guinness-black coffee. After lunch they visited St Fimbar’s Cathedral which seemed like the rest of the city familiar and yet stridently un-English, then took a cab back to the ship, nodding and smiling uncomprehendingly at the driver’s travelogue and what sounded like a long, gloomy weather forecast.

  It was oddly reassuring to be back on the Duchess. Already she had taken on a familiar home-like quality even though she was no more than a floating hotel. It was part of the attraction of cruising that the ship took on an almost protective cocoon-like air so that after the adventures of a day in some foreign port (well, actually as often as not, seen from the synthetic safety of a chaperoned tour bus) one could relax, feel pampered and unthreatened. Travel without danger, holidays without fuss.